A Study Of High School Students' Field Cognitive Style And Metacognitive Listening Awareness

Field-dependence/independence is one of the main components of cognitive style which is an important field to study students' individual differences.The study of metacognitive listening awareness is the precondition of improving one's listening ability which plays an important role in English learning.Therefore,212 high school students have been chosen as subjects,aiming at investigating the correlation between students' FD/FI cognitive style and their metacognitive listening awareness.The paper examines 212 students from Wujiang Senior High school.Their cognitive styles and metacognitive listening awarenesses are tested by using a cognitive style questionnaire designed by Cao Haiying and Ni Chuanbin and a Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire(MALQ)which is designed by Vandergrift.Moreover,all the data is probed through Description Statistics of SPSS 20.0(independent-samples T test and Pearson correlation test)to answer the following questions: 1.Is there any difference between male/female or art/science subjects' FD/FI? 2.Is there any difference between male/female or art/science subjects' metacognitive listening awareness? 3.Is there any correlation between students' FD/FI and their metacognitve listening awareness?Ten undefined field cognitive students are not included in the study.So the major findings of 202 students show that there is a significant difference between male and female subjects' FD/FI.The difference is significant as well between art and science students' FD/FI.In detail,the art students or girls are more prone to FD.On the contrary,the science students or boys are more inclined to FI.As for metacognitive listening awareness,the difference is significant between male and female only in “directed attention”.While the difference is also significant between art and science students in “planning and evaluation”,“directed attention” and “personal knowledge”.The FD students outperform FI ones in “planning and evaluation” and “problem-solving”,but with regard to “directed attention” and “mental translation”,FI students do better than FD students,however,they have no difference in “personal knowledge”.Furthermore,there is a much stronger positive correlation between students' FD and their metacognitve listening awareness.The above findings have a significant impact on teachers' competency-based instructing.For example,students of FD should be asked to study in a quiet place to improve their attention,considering that they are more easily influenced by the surroundings nearby.Students of FI are weak in making use of the prior knowledge,so teachers ought to train their metacognitive listening awareness purposely in order to improve their listening ability by avoiding mental anxiety and translation during listening process.