A Study On The Influence Of Field Dependence/ Independence Cognitive Styles Upon Business English Reading Strategies In Vocational School

As an essential skill in second language learning, reading is an important way inwhich learners could get more knowledge, accumulate vocabulary, familiarizesentence patterns and improve written and communicative abilities. However, theBusiness English learners in vocational school have a relative poor readingcomprehension competence. There is no doubt that it could be a huge obstacle fortheir understanding of the author’s intention in reading comprehension tests and eventheir further working experience. In order to improve students’readingcomprehension competence, the application of reading strategies always be mentioned.Field-dependence (FD) and filed-independence (FI) cognitive styles are the factorscould affect the choices of reading strategies. The present thesis aims to investigatewhether there is any influence of Business English learners’Field Dependence/ FieldIndependence cognitive styles on their reading strategies and explore the validity ofintervention on English reading strategies towards different cognitive style learners.The subjects in this experimental research are 70 sophomores of two classes inFushun Normal College whose major is Business English. One class with 36 studentsis regarded as the experimental class while the other with 34 students is the controlclass. The Group Embedded Figure Test, the Business English Reading StrategiesQuestionnaire involved six strategies, and the reading comprehension tests areemployed in the present study. The collected data is analyzed through the descriptivestatistics, Pearson correlation and independent t-sample test in SPSS 17.0. Furthermore, the experimental class received teacher’s intervention for a semester. Allthe results demonstrate that there is no significant influence of FD/FI cognitive stylesupon Business English learners’reading strategies in vocational school, but differentcognitive style learners adopt different reading strategies that could affect the resultsof reading comprehension tests. Those who have received interventions could dobetter in reading comprehension tests and make greater progress.