An Empirical Study Of The Relationship Between Cognitive Style And Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Learning words incidentally through extensive reading is an important way for language learners to expand their vocabulary. It is also an extensively research topic in the field of second language acquisition. However, there are still many unsettled questions about incidental vocabulary acquisition. Some scholars point out that incidental vocabulary acquisition is very complex and there are many factors that may affect the outcome. These factors include richness of context clues, learning task, and learners' vocabulary size, cognitive style, etc. Despite the fact that a series of studies have researched on these factors, the factor of learners' cognitive style is largely neglected.The present study probes into cognitive style from two dimensions---field dependence/independence and ambiguity tolerance/intolerance, explores the relationship between subjects' cognitive style and their performance on incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading. Besides, the differences between effective learners and ineffective learners in their cognitive style have been investigated. There are five parts in this thesis. Part one starts with a brief introduction to the aims and significance of this investigation. In Part two, we present a survey of research and theories of cognitive style and incidental vocabulary acquisition. In Part three, we first advance the hypotheses, then provide some information concerning the subjects, instruments as well as the procedure of the investigation. Part four presents the data analysis and discussion about the results. Part five is devoted to the conclusions drawn from the present study. Furthermore, implications and limitations of the present study and suggestions for further research are discussed.120 non-English majors in Henan University of Science and Technology are chosen as the subjects and they take the questionnaire for cognitive styles and two vocabulary tests after reading. The data collected were analyzed to find out the possible relationship between cognitive styles and incidental vocabulary acquisition performance. The results indicated that the amount of gained word knowledge significantly correlated with the degree of field independence and ambiguity tolerance, and that there is a significant difference between effective learners and ineffective learners.The findings have both theoretical and pedagogical implications. First, they have confirmed the effects of cognitive style on language learning process, which shows that individual difference in cognitive style has certain effects on the vocabulary learning. Second, they are beneficial for the Chinese English teachers to encourage students to carry out a large amount of extensive reading in order to improve their vocabulary growth.