A Study Of Correlation Between Cognitive Style, Metacognitive Strategies And English Reading Ability

For most foreign language learners, especially the students who view English as a second language or foreign language to study, reading ability is one of the crucial and important skills to master among the four basic skills of language learning: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Not only is it an easy access for learners to acquire information through reading large amount of word materials, but also the most effective way of language input. Therefore, it is very necessary for learners to improve their reading abilities. However, reading is a cognitive, constructive, interactive process in which many factors would influence the reader's ability of dealing with information. Although cognitive style and metacognitive strategies are the two important variables affecting reading performance, there are few empirical studies from the individual differences in cognitive style to analyze students' metacognitive strategy use during English reading process. Based on the related research of the correlation between cognitive style, metacognitive strategies and English reading performance, this paper aims at investigating the impact of different cognitive styles on learners' English reading ability, learners' metacognitive strategy use in English reading and how learners with different cognitive styles employ metacognitive strategies in English reading, so as to promote students' learning of English reading.The subjects of this study were selected from Southwest Jiao Tong University, altogether 139 students respectively coming from three different majors: Bioengineering, Computer Science and Vehicles. Three instruments were involved: the Group Embedded Figure Test (GEFT), Metacognitive Strategy Questionnaire (MSQ) and the Reading Comprehension Test. All the scores achieved by the subjects were typed into a computer and SPSS was used to conduct statistic analysis. The results reveal that:â‘ there is a significant correlation between learners' cognitive styles and reading performance, and field independent (FI) learners generally got the higher scores than field dependent (FD) learners;â‘¡learners' cognitive styles and the metacognitive strategy use are significantly correlated, and compared with FD, FI learners can employ the metacognitive strategies more skillfully and consciously during the reading process, and prefer to plan their own learning process;â‘¢of the five metacognitive strategy categories, selective attention and planning are most frequently used by the subjects, and generally speaking, metacognitive strategies do have some positive influence on English reading;â‘£reading performance can be affected by learners' different cognitive styles through exerting influence on the use of metacognitive strategy.The findings of the present study have both theoretical and pedagogical implications, which contribute the informative data to support one fact that individual differences, that is, differences on cognitive style and metacognitive strategy use, have the certain impact on English reading. First, the findings confirm the effects of cognitive style in English reading, and give the suggestion that learners should adopt different learning strategies in terms of different cognitive styles; second, the findings would be helpful for the teachers to recognize that students with different cognitive styles would prefer different strategies, and then to carry out metacognitive strategy training for the sake of improving different learners' reading efficiency and comprehension.