The Relationship Between College Students' Cognitive Styles And Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary has been widely acknowledged as a key component of language, but many EFL learners feel concerned with the burden of vocabulary learning. As instructors cannot spend much of the limited time teaching new words, incidental vocabulary acquisition has become a significant subject in second language acquisition.A variety of factors that are hypothesized to account for incidental vocabulary acquisition have been investigated. However, relatively little attention has been given to a potential factor—the learner's cognitive style in the studies available. This thesis aims at providing some information on incidental vocabulary acquisition of non-English majors in China and exploring learner's cognitive style. Then the possible relationship between the two variables is investigated.The subjects are 104 non-English major students in Taishan Medical College. The survey instruments include a vocabulary test and a field-independent/dependent style checklist. The subjects were pre-tested and post-tested about the target words to see if they could acquire some knowledge of those supposed target words incidentally while reading. Gains of the target words were measured by the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale, an instrument that was designed to track learners' vocabulary gains in terms of both the number of words they had some knowledge about and the depth of that knowledge. They were also asked to indicate their cognitive style preferences by using a checklist The SPSS was employed to analyze the data collected in the study.The first hypothesis that students will gain in their knowledge of target words through reading alone is evidenced by the data collected in this study. Comparison of the results of the pre-test and post-test shows that the subjects performed significantly better in the post-test with the mean score increasing 10.38, although much knowledge generally stayed at the recognition level. That implies that the subjects do acquire at least some knowledge of the target words through reading the assigned article.The Pearson correlation analysis supports our second hypothesis, which claims that cognitive style preferences influence to some degree the subjects' performance in incidental...