A Study On The Relationship Between College Students' Field-independent/dependent Cognitive Style And Their Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading

Learning words incidentally through reading is one of the important ways for language learners to enlarge their vocabulary size.Incidental vocabulary acquisition(I VA)is an extensive research topic in the field of second language acquisition(SLA)as well.Many second language researchers have investigated the factors which influence IVA,such as learning tasks,the richness of context clues,the topic familiarity,learners5 vocabulary size and so on.However,the factor of learners' cognitive style(CS)is neglected from some extent.Based on the theoretical foundations of Input Hypothesis(IH),Depth-of-Process Hypothesis(DPH)and Involvement Load Hypothesis(ILH),the current study adopted quantitative methodology(Correlation analysis and Independent Sample T-Test)to explore the relationship between learners' field-independent/field-dependent(FI/FD)CS and their IVA through reading by means of questionnaire and vocabulary test.Eighty-seven sophomores from Hubei University of Nationalities attended this study.The Cognitive Style Figure Test(CSFT)was employed to measure learners5 CS.Twenty target words for incidental acquisition in this study were selected from two reading materials in College English Test-6(CET-6).Two research questions are proposed in my thesis,they are:1.What's the difference between FI/FD college students' performance on IVA through extensive reading?2.What is the relationship between college students' FI/FD CS and their performance on IVA?The findings of the current study indicated that there is significant difference between FI and FD college students in IVA through reading;there is a significant positive correlation between learners' degree of FI and their IVA,that is,FI learners performed better than FD ones in acquiring words incidentally through reading.