On The Cognitive Styles And English Learning Styles Of Chinese Non-English Majors

Since the focus of EFL and ESL learning has been shifted from teaching to learning, more and more researches have been conducted on the learners’individual characteristics. Cognitive style and learning style are two of those characteristics that exert an important influence on individual’s EFL and ESL learning. They have been drawing researchers’attention and there have been fruitful research findings of cognitive style and learning style in recent years.In the field of cognitive style researches, Witkin is one of the most important and productive representatives. He has classified cognitive style into two categories: field-independence and field-dependence，and come up with a very popular instrument to test people’s field-independent (FI) and field-dependent (FD) cognitive styles, that is, the Embedded Figures Test (EFT). As for the learning style researches, the representative researcher Joy Reid’s design of the Perceptual Learning Style Preference Questionnaire (PLSPQ) for learning style testing has become one of the most frequently adopted instruments in many studies. This study uses the two instruments mentioned above and conducts a research on 72 non-English majors in Anhui University to study both their cognitive styles and English learning styles. Specifically speaking, the thesis aims to discuss the following questions:(1) What are the features of non-English majors’ cognitive styles? (2) What are the features of non-English majors’learning style preferences? (3) What is the relationship between cognitive style and English learning style preference?The findings of the above questions are as follows:(1) On the whole, the non-English majors tend to be more FD than FI. Males are more FI than females while females are more FD than males. Besides, the relationship between students’ cognitive styles and their English scores is not very significant. (2) The non-English majors have different preferences for the six learning styles. They prefer tactile learning style most, auditory learning style second, then the kinesthetic learning style, visual learning style and individual learning style, and students prefer group learning style least. Among the six learning styles, only the visual and auditory learning styles have a significant relationship with students’genders, males preferring visual learning style while females liking auditory learning style more, while only the visual learning style has a significant relationship with students’ English scores and the correlation is negative, which means that the less preference a student has for the visual learning, the better performance he has in language proficiency. (3) As for the relationship between cognitive styles and English learning style preferences, the results show that generally speaking, there is not a significant correlation between learner’s cognitive styles and their learning style preferences.The findings of this study are significant for both English teaching and learning. For one thing, this study can help the researchers learn the theory of cognitive style and learning style better as well as lay a foundation for further studies. For another, the findings in this study can help not only teachers adjust their teaching methods but students have a better understanding of their own styles. Making full use of the cognitive style and learning style will contribute to the improvement of English learning.