The Study Of Correlation Between The Field Independent/Dependent Cognitive Styles In Cloze Test Performance Of High School Students

The objective of English teaching in China is to cultivate the learners’ ability to use English in a comprehensive way.College Entrance Examination in all provinces of China has attached great importance to the cloze test so as to evaluate the students’comprehensive ability of English language.However,the performance of senior high school students in cloze test is generally so dissatisfied that many researchers are engaged in probing into the reasons,i.e.the relationship between the designs of cloze test and the strategies of the performance.Cognitive style is an important and dispensable factor of learning style which may affect the score of cloze test in some way.Field cognitive style has been theoretically believed to impact the result of cloze tests of different designs(Bachman,1999),Based on the theories of Field Cognitive Style and Oxford Cloze Test and Its Training Strategies,the present thesis tried to approach to the interaction between the cloze settings and the performance of the students in the tests.119 students in Grade 10 participated in GEFT test and the adapted cloze test for college entrance examination paper of 2015.The statistical data were analyzed with SPSS 13.0,and the result of the experiment suggested:First,subjects with FI cognitive styles achieved higher scores in a cloze test.Second,the cloze that located in sentence level benefited the subjects with FD style.However,there was no significant difference between FD and FI in discourse location.Third,from the perspective of correlation,there was a significant difference between cloze test strategies and cognitive styles.Specifically subjects with FI cognitive style enjoyed an advantage in the aspect of content and grammar analysis strategies while subjects with FD cognitive an advantage in skipping strategies.