A Study On The Relationship Between Field Dependence-Independence And English Listening Comprehension

Listening plays an extremely significant role in English teaching and learning. It is one of the basic skills which second language learners should master, and also is an important way to acquire linguistic knowledge. Therefore, it is necessary to improve their English listening abilities. However, listening is a complex cognitive interactive process in which many factors have effect on it. Cognitive style is one of them.The notion of field dependence/independence was first put forward by American psychologist Herman Witkin in 1940s. And researches into the construct of FI/FD cognitive style took place over thirty years. This dissertation tries to study on the relationship between field dependence/independence cognitive style and English listening comprehension. In order to have a better understanding, the first part includes the definitions, characteristics and some related theories of FI/FD, listening comprehension and listening strategies. The differences between FI/FD students'use of listening strategies and their listening abilities are discussed and analyzed. This study also explored the differences on the choice of listening strategies of high and low proficiency listeners.On the basis of the relevant literature review, the present study combines the qualitative and quantitative ways of analysis to discuss the relationship between the students'FI/FD and their achievements of listening comprehension tests,and to study about the strategies FI listeners and FD listeners employ in listening comprehension respectively, and to investigate the differences. This study also explores the influence of listening strategies adopted by FI/FD listeners upon their achievements of listening comprehension tests.The major findings are as follows: 1) The performance of FI students in listening comprehension is much better than that of FD students. 2) Among the three categories of listening strategies, cognitive strategies are reported as being used most frequently, followed by cognitive ones, while the social/affective strategies are the least used ones. 3) There is a positive correlation between the subjects'use of listening strategies and their listening proficiency in terms of cognitive strategies and metacognitive strategies. 4) Although there are many similarities of the use of listening strategies between FI/FD students, the FI students appear to use metacognitive strategies and cognitive strategies more frequently than the FD ones do, and use social/affective strategies less frequently than those FD ones.This dissertation still has many limitations because of the scope of the comparative small sample and the author's limited ability. This thesis is intended only to be a beginning of a series of in-depth studies.