The Impact Of Reflective-Impulsive Cognitive Styles On The Oral Performance Of EFL Learners

With the emphasis of language teaching shifting from teachers to learners, more and more studies are focusing on learners'individual factors at home and abroad. How learners think rather than how they act is becoming increasingly important, contemporary educators are attempting to capitalize and enhance individual's thinking processes. As a significant aspect of learners'individual factors, cognitive style is regarded as the foundation of modern education. Although relevant domestic researches on cognitive style have just started in recent years, it has been highly concerned in both psychological and pedagogical fields in many western studies for a long time. However, most of the studies on cognitive styles were concerned about Field cognitive style, reflective-impulsive cognitive style was hardly touched and empirical studies on this type of cognitive styles are rarely to be found.Reflective-Impulsive cognitive style (R-I), which is a pair of mutually opposite cognitive styles in language learning due to different psychological processes of information-processing, is initiated by Kagan and his colleagues (Kagan, Rosman, Day, Albert, and Phillips,1964) and measured by the MFFT (Matching Familiar Figures Test). According to Kagan, an individual may hold either a slow-accurate or a fast-inaccurate style when processing cognitive tasks. The former style is considered as reflective and the latter one impulsive. There are still another two types of cognitive styles in this respect, those who react quickly to a stimulus but make relatively few careless errors are referred to as "fast-accurate" learners, while those who react slowly and need more time to think but always give an incorrect answer to a task are called "slow-inaccurate" learners (Ehrman, 1996; Salkind and Wright, 1977).In recent decades, with China's increasingly opening up to the outside world, the role of English as a tool of communication between people has become more and more important. Foreign language teachers have realized that making language learners master the rules of perceiving and producing language which is appropriate to a specific situation so as to make them truly effective communicators in the target foreign language is one major goal of foreign language teaching. Therefore, the focus of foreign language teaching is to cultivate not only learners'linguistic competence, but also communicative competence, of which language learners'pragmatic competence is the key part. However, due to the traditional teacher-centered language teaching mode, the oral English teaching pattern has always been single and the individual differences have always been neglected, thus the oral English ability of most college students has proved to be weak.This study attempted to explore the impact of R-I cognitive style on the oral performance of English foreign language learners (EFL learners). The subjects selected in this study were 110 sophomores (English majors) from Nanchang University in Jiangxi Province. They were of similar age and educational background. Their cognitive styles were firstly measured by the Matching Familiar Figures Test 20 (MFFT20) which had demonstrated its reliability as an instrument for evaluating R-I and had led to its widespread use to measure the reflectivity and impulsivity of the subjects (Cairns and Cammock,1978). This experiment lasted for one semester, and the performance of EFL learners with different cognitive styles in the oral English classes were observed. At the end of the semester, an Oral English test was administered to these subjects in order to investigate their oral English performance. In this study, the subjects'oral English performance was evaluated from the aspects of fluency and accuracy. Then the data collected from MFFT20 and the oral English test were put into SPSS 16.0 and the descriptive statistics about the subjects'cognitive styles and their oral English performance would be presented and analyzed, and the relationship between them would be discussed.This study not only adopted quantitative study in the discussion about the correlation between the cognitive styles and oral English performance, but also involved qualitative study including class observation, interview (interviewing the students with typical reflective or impulsive cognitive style and interviewing the oral English teacher) and learners'diary. The results revealed that:1. Among the four types of Reflective-Impulsive cognitive style—the reflective, the impulsive, the slow-inaccurate and the fast-accurate, the number of the reflective group was more or less the same as that of the impulsive group in the same sample, both the number of the slow-inaccurate and the fast-accurate individuals were small and the number of the slow-inaccurate individuals was the smallest one in the sample.2. The results of the oral test shows that, in general, the reflective style individuals performed better in accuracy, while the impulsive style individuals performed better in fluency, the fast-accurate style individuals performed relatively better both in fluency and accuracy, while the slow-inaccurate ones performed not very well in these two aspects.3. Significant differences could be found in the oral performances of EFL learners who hold different cognitive styles. That's to say, the types of cognitive styles could influence EFL learners'oral performance.It can be concluded that R-I cognitive style will affect EFL learners'oral English performance. With this impact, R-I cognitive style can also exert a function in teachers'choices in teaching strategies and learners' choices in their learning strategies. Therefore, great importance should be attached to the differences of learners in cognitive styles in the foreign language learning and teaching.This thesis consists of five chapters, the first chapter is an introduction of this whole thesis, chapter 2 is the literature review on studies of cognitive styles and oral English, chapter 3 introduces the methodology and experiment design, chapter 4 is the analysis and results and chapter 5 is the conclusion and limitations of this study and suggestions for further researches.