Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the Research
Since 1970s，more and more researchers have shifted their study emphasis fromteachers to learners, and they find learners’ individual differences, which includecognitive styles, affective attitudes, motivation and personality have a great influence onlanguage performance. Among all the individual differences, the cognitive styles whichare widely understood as field independence (FI) and field dependence (FD) has been ahot issue and drawn the interests of many scholars.Reading, as one of the important skills, plays a major role for people who want toobtain scientific and technological information. Reading, which is regarded as the mostfundamental skill for English learning, not only lays the groundwork for learners toimprove other skills (such as speaking, writing and listening ), but also serves as animportant linguistic input way for language learners. Meanwhile, readingcomprehension plays an important role in various English proficiency tests. It is clearlythat reading is important for both English mastery and test performance.However, although both teachers and students have realized the importance ofreading and have made great efforts to improve students’ reading performance, the classefficiency and learning results are far from satisfactory. According to the researcher’steaching experiences and related materials, it is because many teachers and learnersdon’t realize that the nature of reading process is constructing new information and inthe process readers will put their known information in the construction.
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1.2 Significance of the Research
It is widely believed that if teachers take students individual differences intoaccounts and learners control their own learning process properly or adopt suitablelearning strategies which can maximize their learning potential, and then learning canbe more efficient and productive. This research attempts to provide some usefulsuggestions to help teachers know learners’ cognitive difference and then take matchingteaching strategies in their classes and help students know how to use learning strategiesproficiently and control their learning process better.Generally speaking, the significances of this research are as follows:First, the topic in this research is hot not only in language teaching but also inlanguage learning. In recent years, the theory concerning learning and learners hasreceived more attention, and individual difference receives much more. Moreover, asone of the most important individual difference, cognitive style, whose core theory isFI/FD, attracts many researchers attention worldwide. Hence, researches on therelationship between different cognitive styles and reading strategies employment andreading performance are provokingly significant. Furthermore, the present researchattempts to explore some creative conclusion and offer some feedback to future teachingand learning.Second, this research also has pedagogical implications. As researches show, onlymatching teaching strategies can promote students’ learning performance, this paper istend to serve as the guideline of language teaching for teachers. For students, onlytaking the suitable learning strategies, making best use of their advantages andbypassing the disadvantages in their cognitive styles, can they get twofold result oflearning with half the effort, hence, this research is also tend to serve as the guideline oflanguage learning for students?
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Cognitive Style
Cognitive style, as a significant aspect of individual differences, it was coined bypsychologist Allport in 1934, who was the first researcher who connected “style” with“cognition” in theory. And the real research about cognitive style began with Witkinwho was horned as “the father of cognitive style”. The research about cognitive stylebegan with 1940s, and prevailed in 1960s, but in 1970s, when it reached the summit,researchers began to explore more areas for psychology research and the research aboutpure cognitive styles declined. In 1990s, researches concerning cognitive style drawscholars’ attention again and they began to connect the theory of cognitive style witheducation. Since then, researchers had made numerous and comprehensive studies andobtained a lot of positive achievements. To define cognitive style, the definition of “style” should be discussed first. Child(1981:75) defines style as the “characteristic ways in which intellectual, motivationaland temperamental factors influence a person’s problem-solving techniques.” Hence,style is a pattern of behavior which has to do with personality and motivation as well aswith the thinking tactics used in tackling problems.Cognitive styles, as one important individual difference, have been defined bymany scholars in previous studies. The following interpretations are concludedaccording to the mainstream points.Allport (1937) coined the term to describe a person’s typical and habitual mode ofproblem solving, thinking, perceiving and remembering.
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2.2 Field-dependence/independence
The term field dependence/independence was first proposed by Witkin in 1940swhen he tested how individual’s perceptions change in perceiving an upright object inrelation to body alignment. From then on, Witkin and his colleagues did a lot ofresearches on this area, like Rod and Frame test, Body Adjust Test and Embeddedfigures Test, and their researches expanded from narrow upright perception tointelligence activities, such as intuitive analysis, memory, problem-solving; and theyalso did a lot of cross-cultural comparison researches. From all the researches, theyfound that people showed different degree of dependence on external reference, thosewho relied heavily on external reference or context factors are FD, in other words, FDpeople have difficulty in finding a simple geometric shape that is embedded in acomplex one; conversely, FI people can readily identify the geometric shape, regardlesshow complex of the background in which it is set.In recent years, in order to explore the combined relationship between cognitivepsychology theory and foreign language learning, researchers in China have made theirgreat efforts. They have provided some theoretical bases for foreign language teachingand learning (Dai Weidong, 1994; Wen Qiufang, 1996, 2001). However, few books areconcerned with the relationship between learning styles and foreign language learningachievement.
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Chapter Three Research Design......26
3.1 Research purposes........26
3.2 Research hypotheses.....26
3.3 Research subjects.....27
3.4 Research instruments.........27
3.5 Research procedures and data analysis.......30
Chapter Four Results and Discussions....33
4.1 Descriptive statistics of GEFT Scores, Reading Comprehension....33
4.2 Descriptive statistics of FI, FM and FD subjects’GEFT scores....34
4.3 Difference of reading strategies employment between FI/FM/FD subject........35
4.4 Difference of reading comprehension test between FI/FM /FD learner.......38
4.5 Data discussions.......39
4.5.1 Discussion of hypothesis one....39
4.5.2 Discussion of hypothesis two.......40
Chapter Five Conclusion.......42
5.1Major findings........42
5.2 Pedagogical implications......42
5.2.1 Implications for learners......42
5.2.2 Implications for teachers.....44
5.3 Limitations and suggestions for future studies......46
Chapter Four Results and Discussions
4.1 Descriptive Statistics of GEFT Scores, Reading Comprehension Scores andTotal Scores of Reading Strategies
Through the statistical software, SPSS 16.0, the descriptive statistics is conductedto analyze the raw data of GEFT. Table 4.1 shows the mean, median, mode, standarddeviation, minimum and maximum and range of all the 110 subjects. The range isconsiderably large with the minimum 7.0 and maximum 38.5 which mean thosesubjects’ GEFT scores are highly dispersed. According to the classification criterion offield cognitive styles, subjects whose scores are 1-11.5 can be categorized as FD; whosescores are 12-22.5 can be categorized as FM; and whose scores are 23-38.5 can becategorized as FI. Table 4.2 shows the descriptive statistics for the scores of all the subjects onreading comprehension test. The score range of the reading comprehension test is 18.With the minimum 22 to the maximum 40. The mean, median and mode for readingcomprehension test are31.027, 30.000and 28, which indicates that the majority ofsubjects obtained a pass mark. And the high value of Std.deviation 4.6065 of the totalreading scores implies that subjects’ reading achievements are highly dispersed, andthose subjects possess diversified levels of reading proficiency.
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Conclusion
The major findings are summarized as follows:First, there is significant difference between FI, FM and FD learners in theiremployment of reading strategies, in which FI use meta-cognitive and cognitivestrategies more frequently than FD learners, while the difference of socio-affectivestrategies employment between them is not significant.Second, FI and FD students have different performance on reading comprehensiontest, and superficially, FI outperform FD in reading performance. However, the authorfinds the result only appear in classroom-oriented reading test, which thanks to thecharacteristics of FI individuals. From analyzing the most excellent learners whosescore is above 34 (14 FI learners; 7 FD; 1 FM,; and 22 in total)of the test, and theinterview subsequent ,the author finds, both FI and FD can become successful learners.Therefore, in the usual foreign language teaching, teachers should identify students'cognitive styles, and their employment of reading strategies. Besides, teachers shouldinstruct and help students to use learning strategies and methods proactively. Thus itrequires that teachers need to diversify their teaching methods as far as possible, inorder to meet different students’learning requirements.
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Reference (omitted)