Impact Of FID On Chinese EFL Learners' Reading Strategies Employment And Their Performance On Two Types Of Questions In Reading Comprehension Test

As one important dimension of individual differences, cognitive style has been a hot issue. As one basic skill in language acquisition, reading has always been the focus of English teaching researches. Reading now is widely recognized as a complex process of cognitive construction. And it is obvious that readers'individual field cognitive styles involve in this complex cognitive construction process. Actually, it is natural for FI/D learners to adopt different reading strategies which will result in distinct reading comprehension competence. After summarizing the previous researches, the researcher did creative job in classifying reading strategies into local and global ones, and in dividing questions into local and global questions. And the present thesis is intended to explore the correlation between FI/D learners'preference on certain kind of reading strategies employment and their performance on different types of questions. To be more specific, the thesis aims to study the following questions:1) Can field cognitive styles impact students'strategy employment? Do students of different field cognitive styles prefer to employ different kinds of reading strategies?2) Can field cognitive styles affect Chinese EFL learners'performance on different types of questions in reading comprehension test?3) Is there any correlation between FI/D learners'preference of certain kind reading strategies'employment and their better performance on specific question types in reading comprehension test?Quantitative and qualitative methods were both adopted in the present study.170 English major juniors from Nanchang University participated in the present study. And three instruments—GEFT, RCT and reading strategies questionnaire were adopted to collect data which would be recorded in computer. The descriptive statistics, independent sample t-test and Pearson product moment correlation were employed to process the data by the means of SPSS 16.0. In addition to quantitative methods, qualitative method----oral interview was also adopted in present study.10 subjects (5 typical Fl learners&5 typical FD learners) were chosen to do the oral interviews which were recorded for future analysis.The results reveal that:1) Significant difference does exist between FI and FD readers in their employment of different kinds of reading strategies; the FI readers prefer to adopt local strategies, while FD readers have a preference for global strategy employment.2) FI and FD students have significantly different performance on different types of questions in RCT. Fl students outperform FD students on local questions while FD students outperform Fl ones on global questions.3) Fl readers'local strategies use is positively and markedly related to their local questions performance, while FD readers'frequent employment of global strategies positively related to their better performance on global questions than that of Fl readers.On basis of the above findings, pedagogical implications are suggested. Language teachers should be conscious of the influence of field cognitive styles on SLA. And it is the important duty for teachers to observe the preferred field cognitive styles of each leaner and try to adopt proper teaching methods according to students' different field cognitive styles and encourage them to cultivate more flexible cognitive styles to fit different reading tasks.