The Infl uence of Field Independent/ Dependent Cognitive Styles on English Majors’ Reading Competence

Abstract

Reading is one of the important ways for English learners to absorb language materials and get perceptual knowledge. It is not only a cognitive and constructive process, but also a process of interacting with each other between learners and reading materials, as well as a process of the use of the reading strategy. However, reading comprehension process is a complex cognitive process and one of the individual factors of English learners is the cognitive style, which embodies features of individual cognitive processing preference. This study is based on the theory of fi eld independence/dependence, which is fi rst put forward by the America psychologist, Witkin.H.A. and this paper adopts questionnaire to investigate English Majors’ cognitive style and reading ability as well as analyzes the infl uence of cognitive features on reading comprehension ability, and thus proposes proper solutions to improve methods of reading teaching.