A Study Of The Relationship Between College Students’ Field Independence/Field Dependence Cognitive Style And Their Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading

Learning words incidentally through extensive reading is an important way for language learners to expandtheir vocabulary. It is also a hot research topic in the field of second language acquisition. However, there is noagreement on how effective the incidental approach is, since many factors may influence the outcome ofincidental learning. Despite the fact that a series of studies have researched these factors, the factor of learners’cognitive style is largely neglected. The way a learner approaches the task of vocabulary learning may beheavily influenced by his or her cognitive style. The present study, with the purpose to explore the effect ofcollege students’ Field Independence/Field Dependence cognitive style on IVA through reading is hopefullycontribute to teaching practice.Quantitative methodology (Correlation analysis and Independent Samples Test) was adopted to explore theinfluence of the field independency/dependency cognitive style on incidental vocabulary acquisition in thisstudy. Data were collected from112students at Gan Su Agricultural University; The Group Embedded FigureTest was employed to measure subjects’ cognitive style. A Greece myth was chosen as the reading material, inwhich12words were chosen as the target words for incidental acquisition. A pretest was used to measure thesubjects’ word threshold so as to choose an appropriate difficult of reading material, and two posttests wereemployed to investigate subjects’ word knowledge gain in the reading. The data showed that the amount ofgained knowledge was correlated with the degree of field independency; FI learners do better than FD learnersin incidental vocabulary learning, and have advantages in retaining these words. Furthermore, the resultsindicated that the correlation was much stronger for the words without marginal glosses than for those withmarginal glosses, that is, for the words without marginal glosses FI learners get a better result than that of FDlearners but not for the word with marginal glosses.The findings have both theoretical and pedagogical implications. First, they have confirmed the effects ofcognitive style on language learning process, which shows that individual difference in cognitive style hascertain effects on the vocabulary learning. The findings also informed language educators and teachers that theeffect of incidental approach to vocabulary acquisition partly depends on students’ cognitive style and thosestudents with a more field dependent style need extra help when learning vocabulary incidentally in order toimprove their vocabulary growth.