The Effects Of Field-independence/dependence Cognitive Style On Chinese Adult EFL Reading Comprehension Abilities

Reading is an indispensable and basic skill in language acquisition. As one of the most important source of input, massive and skillful reading helps facilitate L2 learning since L2 learners can gain an access to enlarging their vocabulary, broadening linguistic and cultural knowledge, and strengthening language awareness and logical thinking. As a consequence, reading has been the focus of language teaching research in relation to linguistic knowledge, cultural background, and individual psychological differences such as motivation, interest, and strategies use. However, reading comprehension abilities of EFL still fail to be improved effectively. Since reading is now widely known as a complex cognitive process, readers'cognitive styles, which are referred to as personal ways of processing information, will lead to individual differences in perceiving and decoding material one is exposed to. So, readers with different Field-independence/dependence (FID) degree will construct their interpretations due to various acquisition and application of learning strategies in reading processes, which will consequently result in different reading comprehension abilities. Nevertheless, few studies have been devoted to investigating the effect of cognitive styles on reading ability. Furthermore, the findings given by the limited number of correlation studies fail to reach agreement, and even are opposite to each other. Therefore, the present study intends to carry on an investigation into the effect of FID cognitive style on Chinese adult EFL learners'reading comprehension abilities.In the present study, Cognitive Style Figures Test, reading comprehension test, and reading strategies questionnaire are conducted among 100 non-English-major sophomores from the Continuing Education School, Shanghai Normal University. The descriptive statistics, Pearson product-moment correlation, independent sample t-test are employed to process the data collected by means of SPSS software. The results shows that FID cognitive style has very low correlation to reading comprehension abilities, but individuals with different degree of FID dimension show a slight tendency to adopt different strategies in EFL reading process and hence possibly possess different levels of reading abilities.In correspondence to major findings, the pedagogical implications are given as follows: (1) Language teachers should help L2 readers get a balanced development between the two extreme points of the cognitive dichotomy and hence achieve flexible cognitive styles in reading learning process; (2)Language teachers are supposed to guide students to establish metacognitive awareness in the process of recombining their cognitive styles; (2) Language teachers are advised to attach more importance to linguistic and conceptual aspect when faced with EFL adult beginners.