The Influence Of Impulsivity/Reflectivity Cognitive Styles On English Learners' Reading Strategies Use And Reading Abilities

Reading is important in language learning. The study of reading strategies has been undertaken activity by psycholinguists and cognitive linguists in recent years. Many researches have been focused on the correlation between the cognitive styles and reading strategies, however, few studies were related to impulsivity-reflectivity. This study attempts to overcome such limitations and chooses impulsivity-reflectivity as the object, trying to examine the relationship among the three variables: impulsivity-reflectivity, reading strategies use and reading comprehension abilities. This study provides more meaningful recommendations for the teaching of foreign languages.The participants are 120 non-English major freshmen from Changchun University of Technology. The study adopts two questionnaires and a test and is the combination of qualitative and quantitative research. The study reveals the following findings: (1) there is almost no correlation between reading abilities and impulsivity-reflectivity cognitive style. There is no difference between the impulsive and reflective readers in reading comprehension test scores. And the blending readers which have the characteristics of both impulsivity and reflectivity are scored highest;(2) metacognitive strategies are applied most frequently and affective strategies are used a little least frequently among the three categories. There is no correlation between impulsivity-reflectivity cognitive style and reading strategies use, but the readers of different cognitive styles have slight tendency to use different specific strategies which possibly cause different levels of reading comprehension abilities;(3) the specific strategies, such as, analyzing, inferencing and practicing are positively correlated to reading abilities, while the strategy of summary is negatively correlative with reading abilities ; (4) higher readers prefer inferencing, contextualizing, self-monitoring, lowering anxiety and encouraging themselves, while lower readers tend to make resourcing, analyze, summarize and translate. But it is not reasonable to say whether a strategy is good or not. Some strategies are used by both higher and lower readers, for example, selective attention and applying images and sounds.The study has significance for pedagogy. Teachers should recognize the different characteristics of impulsivity-reflectivity learners and adopt proper teaching method to deal with the relationship between fluency and accuracy of language. And teachers have the responsibility to awake and improve students'awareness of reading strategies application and teach the impulsivity-reflectivity learners to use appropriate reading strategies according to their own different characteristics in order to get better reading achievements.