A Study On The Correlation Between Cognitive Styles And English Listening Competence Of Chinese High School Students

As an important source of comprehensible input, listening plays an essential role inEnglish learning and teaching. It is one of the means for learners to absorb languageknowledge and to develop their competences of speaking and writing. Therefore, it isnecessary to improve learners’ English listening. However, listening comprehension is acomplex process which is affected by many factors. As an important variable of individualdifferences, cognitive style has been hypothesized to be related to listening competence.However, most of the studies on the correlation between cognitive styles and English listeningcompetence are conducted in the Western L2learning environment and fewer studies havebeen conducted in the Chinese EFL learning environment. Besides, most studies often choosecollege students as research subjects, but seldom the Chinese high school students as thesubjects. Furthermore, no study has been conducted to explore the relationship betweencognitive styles and the English listening sub-skills of high school students in the Chinesecontext.Therefore, this research is intended to investigate the relationship between Chinese highschool students’ cognitive styles and their English listening competence. More specifically,the research focuses on four listening sub-skills, namely listening for main ideas, listening forspecifics, determining a speaker’s attitude or intention towards a listener or topic, and makinginferences, to discover whether there is a significant correlation between FI/D cognitive stylesand each listening sub-skill. Besides, the gender factor is also taken into consideration to testhow it influences students’ cognitive styles and their listening competence. Thus, thefollowing research questions are raised to address the issue:(1) Is there a significant correlation between FI/D cognitive styles and English listeningcompetence of Chinese high school students? If so, is it positive or negative?(2) Is there a significant correlation between FI/D cognitive styles and English listeningsub-skills of Chinese high school students? If so, is it positive or negative?(3) Does gender have a role to play in the relationship between FI/D cognitive styles andEnglish listening competence of Chinese high school students?143high school students are chosen as subjects (76males and67females) in Grade3, inNo.6Middle School of Gangu, Gansu Province. The Cognitive Style Figures Test (CSFT) isused to identify subjects’ cognitive styles. The listening comprehension section of NationalMatriculation English Test (NMET) in2011is adopted to evaluate subjects’ listeningcompetence. The classification of listening sub-skills is based on the Syllabus of NMET in2011. All the relevant data of the CSFT and scores of NMET are calculated by SPSS19.0.Through the analyses of the data, the following results are found: (1) FI cognitive style correlates positively to English listening competence of high schoolstudents. Students with FI cognitive style are more competent than those with FD cognitivestyle in English listening.(2) FI cognitive style is positively related to two listening sub-skills, namely listening forspecifics and making inferences. Students with FI cognitive style are more competent thanthose with FD cognitive style in listening for specifics and making inferences. It fails to find asignificant relationship between FI/D cognitive styles and listening for main ideas anddetermining a speaker’s attitude or intention towards a listener or topic.(3) The gender factor with the cognitive styles does have a significant interactive effecton students’ listening competence. That is, gender plays a role in the correlation between FI/Dcognitive styles and English listening competence of Chinese high school students. There is asignificant difference found in listening scores between female FI and FD subjects, whilethere is no significant difference found in listening scores between male FI and FD subjects.The findings of the research do have some implications for English teaching and learningin China. First, the teachers might be well advised to be aware that students’ cognitive stylesinfluence students’ listening comprehension. They should optimize teaching contents, andneed to develop a variety of teaching strategies and testing instruments to benefit all students.Second, special training in various listening tasks are beneficial to both FI and FD students.The teachers are advised to provide students with different listening tasks according to theircognitive styles. Third, the findings imply that a good test is appropriate for test takers of bothcognitive styles. Therefore, the test designers should take the cognitive style factor intoconsideration. To minimize the effect of personal trait, tasks must be designed in a way to befair for both FI and FD test takers. Finally, the teachers are advised to be aware of genderfactor in English learning, and adopt different strategies to improve students’ Englishlistening competence.