On Correlation Between FI/FD Cognitive Style And Task Types In Task-based Language Teaching

Cognitive style is a field studied by general psychology and educational psychology.Since the1960s, with the focus of language teaching shifting from teachers to students,language (especially foreign language) educational workers and researchers have changedtheir research emphasis from the teaching method and the teaching process to learners andtheir learning process. What’s more, the idea,“student centered” was proposed. However,“student centered” does not mean to return class time to students but to design class based onstudents’ characteristics. Here learning characteristics contain learning style. Differentstudents have different learning style.This dissertation discusses matters from the perspective of cognition that is fielddependent/field independent cognitive style. Shu, Dingfang and Zhuang, Zhixiang (2008)pointed that many researchers did some research on learning style in the early1970s. Theresearchers found that field-dependent students learn foreign languages successfully in naturalenvironment while field-independent students learn well in class teaching environment.However, the result may need more experimental evidence. It is possible that differentlearning goal, task and environment may need different learning style and learning strategy.Therefore, the author proposed a hypothesis that different task need different cognitive stylewhich means students with different cognitive style has different performance whencompleting the same tasks. If there is correlation, the hypothesis is set up. If there is nocorrelation between the two factors, then it means field independent learners have advantagein classroom teaching environment and there is no correlation with learning tasks. Sincedifferent researchers have different standard of classifying task types, there are different kindsof learning tasks. Prabhu (1987) first proposed the idea of task teaching and he divided tasksinto three types: information-gap tasks, opinion-gap tasks and reasoning-gap tasks.Nunan(1989) classified tasks into teaching tasks and real world tasks from the perspective ofauthenticity. Peter Skehan (1998) divided tasks into structure-guided andcommunication-drived. Ellis (2003) proposed focused tasks and non-focused tasks.In this research the author selected108non English major students from XiHuaUniversity, including65males and43females. Firstly，the author used TEF to test the students’ cognitive style(the total points are24，lower than or equal to12is defined as FD,higher than12is defined as FI). Secondly, the author picked30FD students and30FIstudents randomly from the108students and give a lecture to them with Task-based languageteaching method. During the lecture,3judges gave a score to evaluate the completion of eachtask and the final score is the average score of the three scores. Thirdly, the data was analyzedby using SPSS17.0. There are four findings in this research:1. Students of science and technology in XiHua University were tending to be fieldindependent or mixed type.2. In task1: prediction, FI students perform better than FD students.3. In task3: concept-mapping, FD students perform better than FI students.4. In task2and task4:co-operating and role playing, there is no obvious differencesbetween FI and FD students’ performance.This research aims to explore correlation between cognitive style and task types. If thesetwo factors are correlative, teachers can design learning tasks according to students ‘cognitivestyles. This is a good way to realize “students centered”. Students can also learn theadvantages and disadvantages of their cognitive style which will help them adjust accordingto different tasks. If there is no correlation between the two factors, then the hypothesis isfalse. That is to say students with any kinds of cognitive style can perform well in differentlearning tasks.