A Study Of The Relationships Of Reading Strategies To Cognitive Styles And Reading Proficiency

Many studies have been conducted to investigate the relationships of either cognitive styles or learning strategies to the language learning outcome. Studies in which the three are related are comparatively fewer. Specific studies of the relationship between reading strategies, cognitive styles and reading proficiency are even fewer. In the present study, 72 non-English majors in Beijing Electronic Science and Technology Institute are chosen as the subjects and they take the questionnaire on reading strategies, the Group Embedded Figures test and the test of reading comprehension. The data display a list of reading strategies and tactics Chinese EFL learners often use in English reading, and are analyzed in a correlational study to find out the possible relationship of reading strategies to cognitive styles and reading proficiency. The results indicate no relationship between the use of reading strategies and the cognitive styles and a weak relationship between the use of reading strategies and reading proficiency. Based on these findings, the pedagogical implications of teachers' focusing on enhancing the learners' linguistic and conceptual knowledge and using reading strategy training as a supplementary means to help Chinese EFL learners improve their reading proficiency are given, and further researches on the relationship between Chinese EFL learners' linguistic and conceptual knowledge and their reading proficiency are recommended at the end of this thesis.