A Study On Correlation Between Cognitive Styles And Non-english Majors’ Reading Achievements

Nowadays, our country proposes that college English teaching should adoptstudent-centered teaching method and teachers should considerate students’characteristics, learning strategy, and learning style. Students perform differently inthe process of learning. However, the differences in the cognitive style have the greatinfluence on the students’ learning strategies and behaviors. Therefore, it’s veryimportant to know the cognitive style. Reading comprehension is a complexcognitive process, which people develop language context in mind, and reveal themeaning of language material through expectation, inference and so on. Individualcharacteristics of the students, the types of information addressed, and other factorsalso influence reading comprehension. Each factor interacts each other, which mayalso influence cognitive style. Cognitive style is one of the most important factorswhich influence reading comprehension. It mirrors the individual cognitivecharacteristics. Therefore, it is necessary that students should know their cognitivestyles to avoid the defects of cognitive style in their learning.In this thesis, the sixty-four non-English majors are sampled at random fromShenyang Normal University as the subjects. This thesis explores the correlationbetween cognitive style and English reading achievements through measuring thesubjects’ cognitive style and their English reading achievements. By comparing thestudents with field-independent cognitive style and the field-dependent ones, it’s toidentify which type of students achieve the relatively higher scores in English reading comprehension. By comparing the reflective students and the impulsive ones, it’s toidentify which type of students achieves the relatively higher scores in Englishreading comprehension.The present study is the validation study which is to verify its correctness bycollecting and analyzing data. The thesis measures the field-independent/dependentcognitive style by Embedded Figure Test and measures the reflective/impulsivecognitive style by Matching Familiar Figures Test. And the scores is thecharacterization of its measurement. This thesis adopts CET-4readingcomprehension to test the subjects. The scores represent the subjects’ English readingachievements. This thesis is designed to answer the following four questions:1) Isthere the correlation between the field-independence/dependence dimension and theEnglish reading achievements?2) Does the subjects’ field-independent/dependentcognitive style affect their English reading achievement?3) Is there the correlationbetween the reflective/impulsive cognitive style and the English readingachievements?4) Does the subjects’ reflective/impulsive cognitive style affect theirEnglish reading achievements?This thesis adopts quantitative and qualitative method to analyze the correlationbetween the cognitive styles and English reading achievements. The result shows that:(1) Field-Independent/dependent cognitive style and English reading achievementsare indeed related.(2) Field-Independent/Dependent cognitive style affects thesubjects’ English reading achievements. The relatively field-independent subjects gethigher scores than the field-dependent ones in English reading comprehension.(3)The reflective/impulsive cognitive style does correlate with English readingachievements.(4) The reflective/impulsive cognitive style affects the subjects’English reading achievements. The relatively reflective subjects get higherachievements than the impulsive ones in English reading.Finally, based on the results, this thesis provides some implications for thecurrent college English learning and teaching to improve students’ English readingachievements.