A Study On The Relationship Between Field Cognitive Styles, Writing Strategies And ESL Writing Proficiency Of English Majors

The dissertation of the study on the relationship between field cognitive style and ESL writing proficiency of English majors is based on the description of field cognitive style by Witkin et al.. More than 90 sophomores from the School of Foreign Languages in Henan University of Science & Technology are selected as the subjects; two questionnaires, one, GEFT used to measure the field cognitive style and the other used to measure the writing strategy, are adopted; SPSS is used to analyze the data. The main purpose of the dissertation is to discuss how the field cognitive style and the writing strategy influence writing proficiency simultaneously, which will play an important role in writing teaching process.The dissertation is composed of four main parts. The first part is concerned with the literature review on the study on the field cognitive styles and the writing strategy, among which there are fewer studies on the field mobility, one of the field cognitive styles. And also there are fewer studies on the relationship between the field cognitive style, the writing strategy and writing proficiency. And the second part is concerned with the adopted rationale and the theoretical framework. In this part, by referring to the framework of learning process and mechanism and the learning mode, the writing mode, which is concerned with the relationship between the field cognitive styles, the writing strategy and writing proficiency, is formed. So accordingly, the variables and the methods are chosen objectively and reasonably. After that, two questionnaires are finished, and the data are collected. At last, it is concerned with analyzing the data. In this part, with the help of SPSS, the research questions will be dealt with in terms of the normal distribution of the writing score, One-Way ANOVA, Two-Way ANOVA and the linear regression analysis.There are four questions in this dissertation: (1) Is there the correlation between the field cognition and writing proficiency? Which one of the three field cognitive styles of field independence, field mobility and field dependence influences writing proficiency much more? (2) Which one of the three field cognitive styles of field independence, field mobility and field dependence influences writing strategy much more? (3) Is there the correlation between the levels of writing strategy and the level of writing proficiency? Is there difference between different groups based on the writing strategy in terms of writing proficiency? (4) How do both field cognition and writing strategy influence writing proficiency?After the data are dealt with, the conclusion is that there is no correlation between the cognitive level and the writing score, but based on the analysis of One-Way ANOVA, there is difference between three groups of the cognitive styles in terms of the writing proficiency, and the score of the FM group is higher than that of FI group and the score of the FI group is higher than that of FD group. And based on the analysis of One-Way ANOVA, there is difference between three groups of the cognitive styles in terms of the writing strategy. There is the correlation between the writing strategy and its proficiency, and based on the analysis of One-Way ANOVA, there is difference between three groups of the writing strategy in terms of writing proficiency. From the analysis, it concludes that when both the field cognitive styles and the writing strategy influence writing proficiency simultaneously, the former is the original ability, but the mode is indirect, while the writing strategy plays a direct role in writing.Finally, it is concerned with the suggestions and the limitations. The author hopes that more teachers and researchers can do further experiments in order to provide more effective teaching methods.