A Correlation Study On College Students’ Thinking Style, English Reading Strategy And Reading Achievement

With the implementation and development of quality education, numerous educationalexperts put forward that, we should not only lay emphasis on improving students’ academicachievements, but also attach importance to respect their individual difference and theirdevelopment in an all-around way. In the traditional concept, many psychologists andeducators believed that people’s success or failure is mainly attributed to the difference ofindividual’ability (Sternberg,1997; Zhang,2002). In recent decades, scholars have beeninvestigated many other factors, which affecting student’ performance in academic. Amongthem, thinking styles is an important factor. Sternberg proposed that thinking styles is thepreference way of using ability.This study attempts to investigate the relationship among thinking style, reading strategyand reading achievement. The research instruments are the revised thinking styles inventorydesigned by Sternberg and the revised reading strategy questionnaire by Professor WenQiufang, respectively. It adopted the Chinese version for a clear instruction. And it employedthe CET-4reading part as the test paper, for it have proved good reliability and validity. Thesubjects in the study were157non-English major sophomores in Hebei TechnologyUniversity. The collected data were analyzed by the statistical software of SPSS13.0, and itadopted the descriptive analysis, Pearson correlation analysis and independent sample T-test.The study found that, some items of thinking styles are correlated with readingachievements partially, the legislative, hierarchic, external and anarchic styles attained to asignificant level. Reading strategies are correlated to reading achievements, the advancedorganization, transfer and key words strategy reached significant level. Besides, students inhigh score group employ reading strategy more frequent and flexible than students in lowscore group. Some items of thinking styles have influence on the choice of reading strategies,the legislative style is correlated with the self-monitoring and direct-attention strategysignificantly and positively, the oligarchic style is correlated with cooperation and deductionstrategy significantly and positively, and the local thinking style is correlated withself-management and transfer strategy.The result of the present study will make contributions to the development of classroom teaching and evaluating. Teachers should keep a watchful eye on the difference ofthinking styles, and match to students’ thinking styles. Besides, pay attention to cultivatestudents’creative thinking and reading strategy training in classroom.