Effects Of Illustration Types On The English Reading Performance Of Senior High School Students With Different Cognitive Styles

Illustration is always used as an example to make the written text or the utterance more clear in general.In Winarski’s opinion(1997),one picture equals thousands of words.That is to say,illustrations help readers to understand the meaning of unfamiliar language or a great deal of information in the reading material by vivid pictures,clear tables,simple drawings,colorful paintings and so on.With the help of illustrations,it’s easier for readers to understand and acquire the main idea of the written text.As a result,illustrations are applied to many different fields including English language teaching.Based upon Song’s(2005)three types of illustration classification,decorational illustrations,explainable illustrations and promotive illustrations,this study attempts to investigate the effects of illustrations on the reading performance of senior high school students in the process of English reading.In other words,it sets out to research on the correlation between illustrations and high school students’ English reading performance.However,when combined illustration with reading performance,we find that it works quite distinctively on account of the individual differences.For the purpose of dealing with this problem,the study makes a full consideration of the theory of Herman Witkin(1977)and classifies all the participants under this study into three types,field-dependence,field-mix and field-independence.Therefore,the author makes an effort to explore the effects of illustrations on the reading performance of senior high school students with three cognitive styles.This study is conducted among 119 students(57 girl students and 62 boy students)coming from the NanChang NO.17 senior high school in JiangXi province with the test for cognitive style(the Group Embedded Figures Test)and the test for reading performance(the guidance material English Weekly).The research questions are: 1)What is the general situation of illustrations used in the People’s Educational Press English Textbooks and the general picture of students’ cognitive styles? 2)What is the correlation between illustrations and English reading performance of field-dependent students? 3)How do illustrations affect English reading performance of field-mixed students? 4)In terms of field-independence,to what extent are illustrations correlated with students’ English reading performance?The following conclusions can be drawn after the quantitative study.There arequantities of illustrations in the senior high school English textbooks 1-5,including decorational illustrations,explainable illustrations and promotive illustrations,which indicates that illustration play a essential role in the English textbooks and English teaching.Among all the participants under the study,the number of filed-mixed is the largest(60 students),followed by field-dependence(45 students),and field-independence comes the last(14 students).The effect of illustration types on reading performance with three cognitive styles are presented in the following one by one.Firstly,in terms of 14 field-dependent students’ reading performance,the mean score of explainable illustrations is the highest(11.79),and the mean of decorational illustrations reaches the lowest point(9.5).The second and third high means are promotive illustrations and None respectively 10.5 and 10.36.There is a significant correlation between illustration types and reading performance in terms of field-dependent students.The coefficient of explainable illustration to reading peformance is the highest(.953**),while the lowest coefficient is decorational illustration(.601*).Between them is promotive illustration(.790**).Secondly,as for field-mixed participants,the mean score of reading performance without illustrations is 12.43,which is the lowest one among these four reading scores.The mean of decorational illustrations is 12.47,and that of promotive illustrations is12.65.The highest one(13.05)is the mean of reading performance with the help of explainable illustrations.Besides,their reading performance is also closely associated with illustrations.However,the coefficients are lower than that of field-dependent participants.Decorational illustration has no obvious relation to reading performance(.119).Promotive illustration reaches the highest coefficient(.485**),followed by explainable illustration(.414**).Thirdly,speaking of field-independent students,the mean score of reading performance with explainable illustrations is 13.69,which reaches the highest level,and the lowest mean is decorational illustrations(12.84).Between them,the mean of none illustration is 13.04.In addition,the mean score of promotive illustration(13.31)is higher than that of none illustration.And no correlation has been found between decorational,promotive illustration and reading performance.However,there exists a significant correlation between explainable illustration and reading performance for field-independent participants(.441*).