A Study On The Correlation Between Senior High School Students’ Field Dependence/Independence And The Features Of Their English Writing

As an important variable of individual differences, cognitive style is one of the most significant factors that influence students’ learning achievement. Therefore making an intensive study on field independent and field dependent cognitive styles could be conducive to teachers’ teaching according to students’ ability and students’ learning effectively by knowing their own advantages and disadvantages. The study investigates the relationship between field independent and field dependent cognitive styles and the features of students’ writing, including the text organization device (mainly from the aspect of lexical cohesion) and linguistic features (i.e. fluency, accuracy and complexity).The study adopts the Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT), which was revised by Psychological Department, Beijing Normal University, as an instrument to analyze the preference of cognitive styles of100students of Senior2from the Affiliated Middle School of Fujian Normal University and to collect some related statistical data. Meanwhile, the author administered a writing test to the students investigated to get the linguistic features of the writing samples. Then the results were analyzed via the statistical software, SPSS to explore the relationship between students’ FD/FI and the linguistic features of their writing.The main findings are presented as follows:1、FD students perform better than FI students in terms of lexical cohesion.2、FD students perform better than FI students in terms of fluency and complexity; however, as for accuracy, FI students perform better.3、Generally speaking, FD students perform better than FI students in terms of linguistic features of writing. Nevertheless, the correlation between cognitive styles and linguistic features is low. That is to say, cognitive style is a crucial factor that influences the linguistic features of students’writing, but not a decisive one.