An Investigation On The Effect Of Field-dependent/Field-independent Cognitive Style On Question Anxiety And EFL Achievement

With the ever deepening of education reforms, individualized education has become the focus of modern school education. Cognitive style and affective factors have gained more and more attention as critical components of individual learner differences. Field-dependent/Field-independent cognitive style is the most important construct of cognitive style and foreign language anxiety is widely studied as a significant affective factor. Both of these two aspects of individual differences are proved to affect the second language acquisition and achievement to some degree by a lot of investigations. But in China, some researchers propose that a specific kind of anxiety called "question anxiety" is prevalent among students, and it should be valued. This study systematically investigated the effect of Field-dependent/Field-independent (FD/FI) cognitive style of students (n=50) in junior high school on question anxiety and EFL (English as a foreign language) achievement. Evidence was found indicating that students’Field-independent cognitive style (data of students with Field-dependent cognitive style was missing because of the particularity of the sample) did not affect their question anxiety by predisposing them to discriminate some basic language skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing, vocabulary, grammar, etc.); and EFL achievement of students underwent no significant change accordingly.