A Study On The Relationship Between Cognitive Style, Working Memory And EFL Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension is a good measurement of learners’ English proficiency.As an advanced complex cognitive activity, it is definitely influenced by manyindividual difference factors. Working memory is the process of temporarily storingand processing information. The difference of working memory capacity reflectsdifferent reading comprehension ability. While in the process of storing andprocessing, the way that learners organize and represent information will imposedifferent load on their working memory capacity, which suggests that learners’cognitive style and working memory are likely to interact with each other to influencetheir reading comprehension performance.Most previous studies at home and abroad tried to explore the relationshipbetween cognitive style and reading comprehension from the perspective offield-dependence and field-independence put forward by Witkin. Riding’s cognitivestyle theory was formed in1990s, which is a comprehensive construct of cognitivestyle, with previous research findings integrated. He also developed a brand-newmeasurement of cognitive style. However, so far this theory have been applied in fewstudies to investigate the relationship between cognitive style and readingcomprehension. At the beginning of21century, Baddeley(2000) refined his workingmemory model and some other scholars developed different tasks to measure workingmemory capacity. But most studies tried to investigate the relationship between L1working memory and reading comprehension or that between working memory andsentence reading comprehension, there is few research exploring whether L2workingmemory has an influence on reading comprehension and fewer research was carriedout to study the relationship among cognitive style, working memory and readingcomprehension. Based on Riding’s cognitive style theory and Baddeley’s workingmemory theory, the present study mainly explores the relationship between cognitivestyle and EFL reading comprehension from the perspective of wholistic-analyticdimension, the relationship between English working memory capacity and EFLreading comprehension, and whether cognitive style and working memory interact with each other in influencing reading comprehension. The participants werecomposed of118sophomores from the School of Medicine and that of MechanicalEngineering of Zhengzhou University. There are three instruments for data collection,including a CSA (Cognitive Style Analysis) test applicable for Chineseundergraduates which was improved by Professor Li Lihong based on Riding’s CSAmodel, an English working memory test, and a reading comprehension test consistingof two passages from IELTS.After analyzing the collected data, the findings of the research are as follows:(1)Learners’ cognitive style does have a relationship with their reading comprehensionperformance. Wholists and analysts perform differently in their readingcomprehension. On the whole, analysts perform better than wholists in EFL readingcomprehension test.(2) Learners’s English working memory is related to their EFLreading comprehension performance. Learners of different English working memorycapacities behave differently in their EFL reading comprehension performance.Learners with high working memory capacity tend to perform well at EFL readingcomprehension test, while those with low working memory capacity are likely toperform poorly.(3) Learners’ cognitive style interacts with their English workingmemory capacity in influencing their EFL reading comprehension performance.English working memory capacity tends to have higher impact on analysts than onwholists. Analysts are likely to perform well if they have high working memorycapacity but poorly if they have low working memory capacity. Wholists aregenerally unaffected by their working memory capacity but show relatively averageperformance.The results show that learners’ cognitive style and working memory respectivelyhave an influence on reading comprehension, and different working memorycapacities have different impacts on learners of different cognitive styles. The presentinvestigation put cognitive style, working memory and reading comprehensiontogether, which to some extent makes up the vacancy of previous studies. Besides,teachers and learners might get some inspirations from the research results to helplearners improve their reading comprehension proficiency from the perspective ofcognitive style and working memory. However, for the absence of some experimental facilities, the complexity of related theories and the limitation of readingcomprehension test material and also some other reasons, the research content andresearch methodology still needs further study and improvement.