The Correlative Studies Between Cognitive Load And Individual Difference Of College English Learners

Effective instruction has always been the focus for educational researches both at home and abroad. As the name implies, effective instruction refers to such a kind of teaching result, that is, effective and efficient. At present, however, educational studies at home are paying more attention to educators and their teaching methods rather than students, who in fact should be the attention for instruction. According to the studies made by experts at home and abroad, the premise of effective instruction is that all the activities and measures taken by teaching have to correspond with the students'cognition law.Cognitive load theory (CLT) is gaining increasing importance for the past 30 years, mainly in the field of evaluation and design of instruction. It is concerned with the development of effective teaching methods, which can make good use of students'limited cognitive capacity to apply acquired skills and knowledge to new situations. Thus, only in the condition that we have a good control of students'cognitive laws can we make full use of their limited cognitive resources.In this thesis, an empirical research has been made for studying the relation between cognitive load and individual difference. The subject for this research is college students in Shandong Youth University of Political Science aged from 19 to 21 in four classes and the total number is 134 with 41 males and 93 females. With the instrument of questionnaires and Embedded Figure Test, students have accomplished smoothly the corresponding pretests, which enlighten the subsequent studies on relations between cognitive load and individual difference.Having completed the correlative research, the author found that there was a close relation between individual difference and cognitive load, especially in the aspect of cognitive style (i.e., field-dependence & field-independence; holist & serialist; verbal & visual). Individual difference is composed of two parts: physiological and psychological parts, in which psychological part is the key for studying in this thesis. Psychological difference contains several components, in which cognitive style plays the key role in it and is the representative for individual difference in this paper. The field-dependent and field-independent models have little effects on students'cognitive load, while the verbal and visual models have a significant effect. Of course, there does exist some limitations contained in this research. The research scope is only confined to some colleges, or strictly just two colleges, which, in some aspect, cannot represent the overall phenomenon by all universities and colleges in China. Thus, further expanding or enlarging the research scope will be the core for future studies. In the end of the paper, several recommendations have been put forward on how to improve English teaching and decrease cognitive load. According to these suggestions, English teachers could learn the importance of individual difference and teach them in accordance with their aptitude.