Effects Of Reflectivity-Impulsivity On Lexical Inferencing In Senior High School English Reading

As a primary approach of language input,reading is crucial for Chinese English language learners to learn vocabulary.When second language learners encounter new words in the reading process,one of the most common strategies they use is to guess the meaning of words through context.It is called lexical inferencing,the process by which readers infer the meaning of words by searching their own knowledge and all the information and clues available in the context,including the understanding of the article and related language knowledge.This can be seen as a problem solving process.Reflectivity-impulsivity is one of the cognitive style dimensions widely studied by researchers.This type of cognitive style emphasizes how the individual pays attention to a given task,how the individual thinks about possible answers and how they evaluate the possible answers to the task,which are related to the degree to which the individual responds to generation of hypothesis in the process of solving an uncertain problem.Therefore,the reflective and impulsive cognitive style may have an impact on contextual lexical inferencing.This study adopts a 2×3×3 multi-factor mixed design and selects 40 sophomore students from a key senior high school in Chongqing.By studying the accuracy and average response time of participants with the reflective-impulsive cognitive style in the three types of morphological questions and the three types of target word class,the study is conducted to study the impact of the reflective and impulsive cognitive style in lexical inferencing in high school English reading.This study raises four research questions:(1)What are the effects of 3 factors,cognitive style,morphology of target word and target word class,on accuracy and reaction time in lexical inferencing?(2)How do cognitive style and morphology of target word interact with each other in their effects upon accuracy and reaction time in lexical inferencing?(3)How do cognitive style and target word class interact with each other in their effects upon accuracy and reaction time in lexical inferencing?After data analysis,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)Reflective-impulsive participants have a difference in the accuracy of lexical inferencing,and a significant difference in average reaction time.The morphology factor has a significant difference in the accuracy of lexical inferencing,and a difference in the average reaction time.The word class factor is insignificant in terms of both accuracy and average response time in lexical inferencing.(2)The questions of the three kinds of morphology,namely,the target word whose morphology is not helpful on lexical inferencing,whose morphology has a positive effect for lexical inferencing and whose morphology has a negative effect on lexical inferencing,have an interactive influence with the cognitive style.(3)The three kinds of target word class,namely nouns,verbs,adjectives,have no interactive effect with cognitive style.