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Since 1980s, especially for the recent two decades, China’s language teaching research direction has changed greatly. Some of these have changed from teacher-centered to student-centered, from emphasizing teaching methodology to learning methodology, from simply receptive learning to autonomous, cooperative and inquiry-based learning. Researchers begin to turn their attention to foreign language learning subject, learners’ characteristics, as well as the inpidual learners’ differences between inner and outer factors.
In all these research focuses, one of the hot spots is the influence of different cognitive styles on language learning. And as one of the most important part of cognitive style, the field dependent and field independent styles received a wide concern. And this paper also focuses on this perspective.
Researches on field dependence-independence have a long history. In this chapter, there is a concrete review of the other researchers' achievements on this aspect by checking the origin and development of FD/FI research and its present research situation. Then other researches on the related concepts of learning styles and cognitive styles have also been outlined here to provide a general view in this field. Finally, brief comments on the present research have been made to pave the way for further evolvement of our research.
1.1.1 History and present researching situation of FD/FI
FD/FI, as a cognitive construct, was originally proposed and developed by Herman Witkin in mainstream psychology. Fifty years ago, Witkin(1948) discovered that inpidual have differences feeling about the same environment, but people show remarkable consistency in degree of field dependence on tests of orientation perception. The cognitive style FD/FI has been defined as the extent to which a person perceives part of a field, and it also indicates how a person can discrete from the surrounding field as a whole, it’s the extent to which a person perceives analytically. After working out the perception test using rods and frames, Witkin finally developed the Embedded Figures Test to determine the degree of field dependence or independence we each possess. As for the details of methods used to measure FD/FI degree, there will be a deep discussion in the chapter three.
Later in 1962, Witkin proposed that a contrast can be made between analytic and holistic inpiduals. The former groups, the analytical, faced with a situation in which decision-making is necessary, and they then focus on the components which have significance for decision making. These analytic inpiduals indicate the FI people, such people are also likely to be aloof and not oriented towards people, and they are unlikely to be skilled operators within teams. On the contrary，as for the holistic inpiduals, they prefer to begin with the whole picture. In addition, they strive for unity between events or objects and they are more likely to think by means of analogies and to make great use of metaphors and similes in drawing conclusions, but they cannot easily perceive the specific information embedded in the whole passage. These holistic inpiduals indicate the FD people
1.1.2 Educational implication of FD/FI
After the cognitive construct FD/FI has ever been proposed by Witkin, its application in education began to arouse great interest of many researchers. With reference of FI/FD style, the FI students' personality tendency to rely on internal frames of reference, Seliger and Day suggest that the FI learners, might be the more confident language learner, actively speaking out in class and taking risks, thereby receiving more of the instructors' attention.
Chapelle and other researchers find compatibility of the FDs’ preference for social interaction with language acquisition through contextualized practice with native speaker. Other researchers have hypothesized that cognitive restructuring ability (FI) would increase one's ability to monitor grammatical correctness. According to Lu, C.,&Suen, H(1995), FI students were able to identify the relevant information in a problem in order to formulate a solution, whereas field dependent students identified more perfunctory information that dealt more with social issues.