A Research On The Design Of Junior Middle School English Instructional Activity Based On The Independent-Field And Dependent-Field Cognitive Style Of Students

With the implementation of the new curriculum standard’s reform,the teaching ideas has changed greatly.In the past English classes,the focus of teachers was on how to teach.They won’t pay too much attention to how students learn.Each student has a different cognitive style,and the way they deal with information and learning is also different.Students with different cognitive styles have different thinking in the same instructional activities.This research can help English teachers understand the current situation of junior high school students’ cognitive styles and their differences in reading thinking,and make some suggestions for better designing English instructional activities.On the basis of previous researches,the researcher found breakthroughs in the differences of students’ thinking and used this as a basis for the design of junior high school English instructional activities.This research first used Witkin’s Embedded Figures Test(EFT)to test the students’ field cognitive styles,and selected 60 students with typical field cognitive styles in the Class 3 and Class 4,Grade 8 of the University City No.1 Middle School as experimental subjects.The research then tested their English reading and used interviews to find out the differences in their ideas in various reading questions.The researcher designed junior high school instructional activities on the basis of such differences and used classroom observation method and interviews to explore whether such instructional activities can better help students achieve learning goals.The results of the research showed that in the junior high school stage,boys were more inclined to the field-independent cognitive styles,and girls were more inclined to field-dependent and mixed cognitive styles.Students with different field cognitive styles show significant differences in the thinking process of reading.Field-independent students like to use bottom-up reading patterns to delve into the nature of things.They have their own internal reference standards,prefer to think independently and are excel at information processing and logical reasoning.They prefer a simple to complex decoding process.Field-dependent students like to use top-down reading patterns.They are easy to see the superficial phenomenon of things only.They have no internal reference standards and are not good at logical reasoning.But they are good at using association,analogy and background knowledge to grasp the structure of the text.In the English instructional activities based on the differences of students’ different cognitive styles,the students’ participation,answer accuracy and practice correct rate are higher,which helps students better achieve their learning goals.Therefore,teachers need to fully understand the differences in students’ field cognitive styles,and design diversified instructional activities in junior high school English classes to break through the difficult points.Teachers also need to take group cooperative learning to foster strengths and avoid weaknesses,and finally satisfy students with different cognitive styles in the classroom.