A Research On Cognitive Models Of EFL Reading

Reading is not only one of the basic skills which foreign language learners should master, but also one of the main channels of linguistic input for them. Cultivating students'abilities of gaining information through reading is the focus of English as foreign language (EFL)teaching and learning, and also improving students'reading abilities is one of the main aims of college English teaching and learning. Reading is a cognitive process, in which readers actively understand the meaning of a text. During the process, many factors have effect on reading and the improvement of reading ability. Cognitive style is one of the factors, which is assumed to affect the efficiency of reading. Previous studies concerning cognitive style find that there exists a significant relationship between it and certain language tasks. However, few studies have been done to investigate cognitive style in terms of its relation to listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation. In the paper, field-dependence (FD) and field-independence (FI) cognitive style have been used to research on EFL reading and the improvement of reading ability.Field-dependence and field-independence were proposed by Witkin in 1954. The dichotomy is used to describe the individual differences in perceiving and processing information. Readers who possess different characteristics are different in understanding and processing texts. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods were adopted in the paper, the purposes of which were to discuss field tendencies of arts and science majors, explore relationships between cognitive style and reading ability as well as put forward cognitive models of reading that were applied to different field tendency readers respectively. The applications of the new cognitive models have been performed in the practice in order to instruct reading. The statistics in the chapter five have validated the rationality and feasibility of Cognitive Model 1 and Cognitive Model 2. The Group Embedded Figure Test was used to judge students'FD/FI tendencies; a test of reading comprehension was designed to assess students'reading abilities. 120 non-English students majoring in Law and Physics in Xiangtan University took part in the experiment (half of them were Law majors and the other were Physics majors). The data collected from this experimental study were analyzed by the descriptive statistics and inferential statistics—skewness and correlation study. The results of the third chapter revealed that arts majors were more predominantly field-dependent, while science majors were more of FI. There existed a negative significant relationship between FD/FI cognitive styles and reading ability. And because arts majors and science majors prefer to use their own style of reading without paying attention to other unfamiliar reading styles,...