The development of a Persian reading span test for the measure of L1 Persian EFL learners’ working memory capacity

This study describes  working  memory and developing and validating of an  L1 Persian reading span test for the measurement of working  memory of L1 Persian EFL learners. The test, which included  64  Persian  sentences,  was  developed  based  on  Daneman  and Carpenter’s (1980) reading  span  test.  The  shortcomings  of  the  test  were  identified  and  removed  over  three  pilot studies  on  74  participants.  The  final  test  was  used  in  a  study  with  140  participants  at  three different proficiency levels. The results of  an item analysis, as indicated by Cronbach’s Alpha, displayed  an  internal  reliability  of  .844  and  .790  for  the  RST  processing  and  recall  scores respectively. This suggests that the newly developed test is reliable enough and could be used to measure  working  memory  capacity  for  future  L2  studies.  This  study  also  provides  a  clear procedure for the development of a reading span test for speakers of other languages.