A Study On The Correlation Between Cognitive Style,Working Memory Capacity And College Students’ English Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension is a complex cognitive process.It is a process of forming a situation of language description in the mind and revealing the meaning of language materials through expectancy,reasoning and other activities.Individual differences will influence reading comprehension.There will be complex interactions among various factors.One of the individual factors affecting reading performance is cognitive style.Another factor affecting the individual is working memory capacity,that is,reading span.Based on the previous studies in China and overseas,this study investigates the correlation between cognitive style and college students‘ English reading comprehension,the correlation between working memory capacity and college students‘ English reading comprehension and these two individual differences‘ interaction.Two tests are conducted in this study.They are screening test and formal test.In the screening test,the field cognitive style is screened by embedded figure test.Then the working memory capacity of the subjects is determined by reading span test.56 subjects are selected for the formal test.After screening out individuals with different cognitive styles and different working memory capacity groups,subjects are asked to complete English reading comprehension tasks within 40 minutes.Then the data are collected and analyzed on SPSS 22.0 to compare the performance differences among different individuals.The following conclusions can be drawn:(1)college students‘ reading comprehension are related to their cognitive styles.Field-independent cognitive style subjects have better reading scores than field-dependent subjects(2)college students‘ reading comprehension are related to their working memory capacity.Subjects with high working memory capacity have better reading scores than those with low working memory capacity.(3)there is marginal interaction between cognitive style and working memory capacity.The reading scores of field-independent subjects in high working memory capacity is much higher than that of other types of subjects.In low working memory capacity group,there is no significant difference in reading scores between field-dependent subjects and field-independent subjects.In field-dependent group,there is no significant difference in high and low working memory capacity groups.Finally,the author tries to explore pedagogical implications on English reading comprehension teaching and to put forward some limitations and suggestions of this study.