A Study Of Influence Of Cognitive Styles On English Reading Strategies Of Students In Senior High School

Reading is not only an indispensable language skill,but also a main approach to information input and knowledge acquirement.However,some senior high school students have some barriers in reading comprehension.Their cognitive styles and English strategies' use are regarded as important factors.To improve their reading proficiency,this thesis explores the influence of cognitive styles on English reading strategies of students in senior high school on the basis of the related theory of cognitive styles and reading strategies.Three research questions are proposed for the study.They are: 1.What are the senior high school students' FD/ FI cognitive styles? 2.What are the English reading strategies adopted by FD/FI students? 3.What's the correlation between FD/FI cognitive styles and English reading strategies?To answer the three research questions,200 senior high school students are selected randomly from Yantai No.3 Middle School as participants.Then,three instruments--GEFT,questionnaire of reading strategies and interview--are adopted in this study.They do the GEFT first and then complete the questionnaire of English reading strategies stapled to GEFT paper.190 test papers and 190 questionnaires are valid in total.Afterwards,a descriptive analysis is made on the data collected from test papers and the questionnaires to answer the first two questions and a correlation analysis is made on them to answer the last question.Finally,as the results of correlation between cognitive styles and cognitive reading strategies is not consistent with the prior findings,8 FD students and 8 FI students are interviewed and the contents are recorded and transcribed into text.It aims to analyze the external factors that lead to the none correlation between cognitive styles and cognitive strategies.The major findings are presented as follows.Firstly,FI learners take up 65% while FD learners occupy 35%.Thus,the majority of students belong to FI learners.Secondly,the descriptive analysis indicates that FD/ FI students have different tendency in using reading strategies.FI learners have an advantage in using metacognitive strategies and cognitive strategies while FD learners perform better in using social/affective strategies.Finally,By virtue of Pearson correlation,it is found that there is a weak correlation between cognitive styles and overall reading strategies.However,FI cognitive style has a positive correlation with metacognitive strategies and presents a negative correlation with social/affective strategeis;FD cognitive style has a negative correlation with metacognitive strategies and shows positive correlation with social/ affective strategies;FD/FI cognitive styles have no correlation with cognitive strategies.Furthermore,seen from the interview,teachers' instruction,guidance from reference books and personal experience are the main external factors that influence the zero correlation between FD/FI cognitive styles and cognitive strategies.Taking above findings into consideration,teachers should adopt the teaching methods matching with students' cognitive styles and students are supposed to widen their own reading strategies according to their own cognitive styles.