A Study On Field Dependence-Independence And Its Influence Upon English Reading Strategies

Reading is a cognitive, constructive, interactive and strategic process in which many factors have effects on the reader's process of comprehending. The cognitive style is one of the factors which are assumed to influence the reading process. Readers usually employ reading strategies to improve their reading efficiency. The thesis is an attempt to explore the influence of college freshmen' field dependence-independence (FD/I) cognitive style upon their use of English reading strategies. Three categories of reading strategies — metacognitive, cognitive and social/affective strategies are involved in the present study. Each category of reading strategies consists of many subcategories. The research questions addressed in the study include: 1) What are the characteristics of English reading strategies adopted by college freshmen? 2) What is the influence of college freshmen' FD/I cognitive style upon their use of English reading strategies?The participants involved in this study are 175 freshmen majoring in English, Physics and Chinese at Qufu Normal University. Data are collected through a combination of the Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT) and a reading strategies questionnaire. Data are analyzed by using SPSS 11.5 and adopting such statistical measures as descriptive statistics and Mann-Whitney U tests. The major findings are as follows: 1) College freshmen use metacognitive strategies most frequently, followed by cognitive and social/affective strategies. The frequently used reading strategies are "planning", "self-monitoring", "self-management", and "grammatical analysis". The seldom used reading strategies are "personal elaboration", "cooperation", "self-evaluation" and "making one's own reading plans". 2) The differences in the use of reading strategies between field-dependent (FD) and field-independent (FI) freshmen are not only found in their use of metacognitive and social/affective strategies, but also in their use of cognitive strategies. FD students employ such reading strategies as "making one's own reading plans",...