The Interactive Effect Of Thinking Style And Topic Familiarity On English Reading Comprehension Of High School Students

The present research takes Sternberg’s thinking style theory and the schema theory as theoretical basis to investigate the interactive effect of thinking styles and topic familiarity on English reading comprehension of high school students by way of questionnaire analysis.The questionnaires used include Sternberg’s Thinking Style Questionnaire and the Topic Familiarity Questionnaire,the results of which are analyzed together with the reading comprehension result of the high school students.The research intends to solve the problems as follows:1)Do different thinking styles have any influence on the reading comprehension scores of high school students?2)Do different degrees of topic familiarity have any influence on the reading comprehension scores of high school students?3)What’s the interactive effect of thinking style and topic familiarity on English reading comprehension of high school students?The research results show that:1)The scores of each thinking styles are above the level of average.Among them,more students tend to be the legislative style,the executive style,the external style and the liberal style.Few of them are the conservative style,the monarchic style,the oligarchic style and the local style.2)The different thinking styles of high school students have exerted an influence on the result of reading comprehension.For example,there are positive correlation between the detailed questions and the legislative style,the liberal style,the oligarchic style and the monarchic style.3)The topic familiarity has a positive influence on the reading comprehension scores of high school students.In detail,there are positive correlation between the theme questions,detailed questions,the reasoning questions,and the average topic familiarity.It shows that when students do reading comprehension,the more familiar with the topic the higher score of theme questions,detailed questions and the reasoning questions.4)The analysis of the interactive effect of thinking style and the topic familiarity indicates that the reading comprehension scores depend more on the topic familiarity,and less on the thinking styles,but the thinking styles exert influences on students’ performance on different types of questions.The aim of the present research is to help teachers to guide students to achieve autonomous learning according to students’ thinking styles,to cultivate students’self-reading ability by adopting reading methods suitable to them,and to enhance their awareness of independent learning so as to have a belief of lifelong learning.