Impact Of Field Cognitive Styles On EFL Learners’ Reading Strategies Employment And Reading Performance

Since1970s，more and more researchers have shifted their study emphasis fromteachers to learners, and they find learners’ individual differences, which includecognitive styles, affective attitudes, motivation and personality have a great influence onlanguage performance. Among all the individual differences, the cognitive styles whichare widely understood as field independence (FI) and field dependence (FD) have beena hot issue and drawn the interests of many scholars.Reading, as one of the most important approaches for people who want to obtainscientific and technological information, is seen as a complex process of cognitiveconstruction. Obviously, in this process, the difference of readers’ field cognitive stylewill have a great influence on reading strategies employment and reading performance.This paper bases on the previous researches, using the internationally recognizedclassification of reading strategies brought up by O’Malley&Chamot (1990) to explorethe relationship between cognitive style difference and reading which includes readingstrategy employment and reading performance. To be more specific, it is to answer twoquestions: a. what influence does the cognitive style of FI, FM and FD have onparticipants’ reading strategies employment? b. What influence does the cognitive styleof FI, FM and FD have on participants’ reading performance?The participants of this research are110sophomores from two classes of ComputerScience and Technology Department of Yuncheng College, and the author is theirEnglish teacher. Quantitative method is adopted first, and after the data is out, the authorfinds some data violate her hypothesis, and adopts interview to explore the reasons ofthe violation. Three instruments--GEFT, reading strategies questionnaires and readingcomprehension tests are adopted to collect data which is recorded in computer with thesoftware SPSS16.0to analyze. The results of the research reveal that: first, significantdifference does exist between three cognitive styles readers in their employment ofmeta-cognitive and cognitive strategies, in which FI uses the most, and FD uses theleast, which is consistent with the hypothesis. However, the result shows there is nosignificant difference between the three cognitive style learners in using thesocio-affective strategy, which violates the author’s hypothesis. From the subsequentinterview, the author finds it results from learners’ reading habits that is formed in their middle schools; second, FI learners get the highest mean score in readingcomprehension tests, and FD learners’ scores are the lowest, just from this result, it iseasily to conclude that cognitive styles have influences on reading performance;However, through the further analysis of raw data, the author finds among22excellentlearners, there are14FI learners,7FD learners and1FM learner, which indicates thatboth FI and FD can be successful English learners. The results that FI learners have ahigher mean score and more excellent learners may show FI learners have someadvantages in the classroom-oriented situation.On basis of the above findings, some pedagogical implications are suggested.Language teachers should be conscious of the influence of field cognitive styles on SLA.And it is an important duty for teachers to observe the field cognitive style of eachlearner and try to adopt matching teaching strategies in class, and meanwhile, teachersshould encourage learners to realize their cognitive styles and cultivate more flexiblereading strategies to fit different reading tasks.