A Research On The Impact Of FI And FD Cognitive Styles On English Majors’ Reading Strategies And Reading Scores

Reading is one of the most important skills in the field of second language acquisition.English reading ability is a reflection of students’ comprehensive English ability.Improving English reading ability is one of the teaching objectives in college English major.It is well known that learners with different cognitive styles tend to show different reading behaviors in the process of reading.The relationship among cognitive styles,reading strategies and reading scores has been a hot topic in recent years.As one of the most important categories of cognitive styles,field independent(FI)and field dependent(FD)cognitive styles have been widely concerned by scholars at home and abroad.This thesis explores the differences of reading strategies and reading scores among English majors with FI/FD cognitive style,which attempts to answer the following three research questions:Question 1: What is the distribution of English majors with FI/FD cognitive style?Question 2: What reading strategies are more likely to be used respectively by English majors with FI/FD cognitive style?Question 3: What are the differences among English majors with FI/FD cognitive style in English reading scores?Based on these questions,269 English majors in Grade 2018 from College of Foreign Languages in Bohai University in Liaoning Province are chosen as the research’s participants.The Cognitive Style Figure Test is used to distinguish learners’ cognitive styles,reading strategy questionnaire and interview are used to investigate the situation of use of reading strategies by English majors with FI/FD cognitive style,and the thesis also tests learners’ English reading scores by multiple choice reading comprehension questions of TEM-4.At last,the major results are obtained by the data analysis,such as descriptive analysis and independent sample T-test.The results show that there are more FI learners than FD learners among college English majors.Learners with FI cognitive style are better at the use of meta-cognitive strategies and cognitive strategies in the process of reading.However,learners with FI/FD cognitive style have few differences in the use of social affective strategies.The English reading scores of FI learners are higher than that of FD learners.