认知风格与附带词汇习得的实证性研究
ABSTRACT
KEY WORDS：cognitive style, field independence, ambiguity tolerance, incidental vocabulary acquisition
Incidental vocabulary acquisition (IVA), which occurs without the specific intent to focus on vocabulary, has been shown to be an effective way of learning word meanings from context (Nagy, et al., 1985; Day, 1991; Joe, 1995; Coady, 1997). In the psychological literature, numerous experiments have been conducted to verify the fact that incidental learning plays an important role in students’ second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition. For example, Nagy, Herman, and Anderson (1985) conclude from their own experimental study that children indeed do learn large numbers of words by means of incidental learning from written context. Dupuy and Krashen (1992) also found in the research that the learners who participated in reading and watching a film in class acquired approximated 5 to 10 words per hour through incidental learning from a text.
However, there are still many unsettled questions about IVA. Some scholars point out that IVA is very complex and there are many factors that may affect the outcome. A large number of studies have been conducted to address these factors, which include richness of context clues, learning task, exposure frequency of new words, learner factors, including learners’ cognitive style, vocabulary size, cultural background, motivation, etc. Many empirical studies explored the effect of these factors on incidental vocabulary acquisition. For example, Laufer and Hulstijn (2001) examined the influence of different reading task on acquisition. Knight (1984) investigated the influence of dictionary use on students’ vocabulary inference and retention. Mondria and Boer (1991) analyzed the positive role of contextual clues in incidental vocabulary acquisition. However, the factor of learners’ cognitive style is largely neglected.
Many psychologist and educators believed that people’s successes and failures in learning a second language have much to do with individual differences in ability. In the past few decades, investigators made extensive researches on the roles of individual differences such as intelligence, cognitive style, and personality on human behavior. As a result, the main academic focus in education had shifted from the concerns for instructors and teaching approaches to that for learners and their individual differences since 1960s. Now there are a considerable number of studies that have investigated the relationship between cognitive styles and L2 learning achievements. All of studies on cognitive studies were done from various perspectives, and the current study focuses on the studies on field dependence/independence (FD/I) and ambiguity tolerance/intolerance (AT/I). There are also numerous studies on the influence of these two facets of cognitive style on language acquisition from different aspects such as listening, reading, cloze and grammar learning. However, a very important area – vocabulary acquisition – has been largely ignored. Especially, to date, there is no study specifically addressing the relationship between cognitive style and IVA.
The present study, with the aim to explore the relationship between IVA and cognitive style, will hopefully contribute to the theoretical study and teaching practice in the following ways:
Firstly, there has been a longstanding debate about the relative effectiveness of intentional vocabulary acquisition and incidental vocabulary acquisition. Represented by Krashen (1989), the indirect group advocates that vocabulary should be acquired in an indirect way to facilitate their use in real communication. Learning words incidentally through extensive reading is a typical way of indirect learning. On the contrary, the direct group, including Beck, McKeown and McCaslin (1983), insists direct vocabulary learning is the most important way for vocabulary learning since indirect vocabulary learning is not reliable and some learners gain little from reading. This debate has continued for about two decades and has not been solved yet, partly because each group can present some convincing evidence that there are learners who can learn vocabulary very well in either a direct or an indirect way. However, if we consider this problem from the cognitive perspective, we may find that learners’ vocabulary learning approach tendency may due to their different cognitive styles. One approach may accord with one cognitive style, but not with the other. An investigation of the influence of cognitive style on incidental vocabulary acquisition will shed light on this problem and help to solve the debate.
Furthermore, the study will help EFL/ESL (English as a foreign/second language) learners to identify their cognitive style preferences in order to maximize their vocabulary acquisition achievements. Cognitive styles differs a lot between different learners, therefore it is of considerable importance to maximize the advantages and to minimize the disadvantages of individual cognitive styles, so as to facilitate the efficiency of incidental vocabulary acquisition. The findings of the study also help teachers to give students a good guidance on their vocabulary learning activities.
In order to understand the relationship between cognitive style and incidental vocabulary acquisition, the author has designed an experiment to establish the relationship between the students’ FD/I, AT/I and their performance of IVA. To be more specific, this study attempts to answer the following questions:
1) What is the relationship between the students’ FD/I cognitive style and their performance on IVA?
2) What is the relationship between the students’ AT/I cognitive style and their performance on IVA?
3) Are there any differences in FD/I and AT/I between effective and ineffective learners?
The intended outcome of Question 1 is to find out the correlative relationship between students’ FD/I and IVA, that is, whether their FD/I influence their performance on IVA. Similarly, the intended outcome of Question 2 is to find out whether students’ AT/I cognitive style has an effect on their performance on IVA. And the intended outcome of Question 3 is to find out whether there are any differences in students’ cognitive style between effective and ineffective learners according to their scores on IVA.
关 键 词：认知方式，场独立，歧义容忍度，附带词汇习得
在阅读过程中附带地习得词汇是学习者扩大词汇量的一个重要方式，这也是二语习得领域一个广泛研究的课题。然而，关于附带词汇习得还有许多未解决的难题。一些学者指出，词汇的附带习得是一个复杂的过程，它的发生受到很多因素的制约，如学习任务、语境线索、本文来自优文论文网原文请找QQ752018766学习者的词汇量、猜词能力以及认知风格等。尽管有许多关于这些因素的研究，但认知风格对附带词汇习得的影响却没有引起人们的关注。
本文从场认知和歧义容忍度两个纬度对学习者的认知方式进行分析,探讨了英语学习者的认知方式与词汇附带习得的相关关系，同时还探讨了高效词汇习得者和低效词汇习得者在认知方式上的差异。全文共有五部分组成：第一部分介绍毕业论文http://www.youerw.com 了本项研究的目的和意义；第二部分介绍了认知风格和词汇附带习得的研究现状及理论基础；第三部分详细介绍了本项研究中受试，测试工具和研究步骤等情况；第四部分报告了数据统计分析的结果及相关的讨论；最后一部分得出结论，并提出本研究对理论研究与教学的启示意义，同时指出本研究的不足及对今后研究的建议。
来自河南科技大学120名非英语专业学生参加了这次调查，受试接受了关于认知风格的问卷调查和两次阅读后的词汇测试。通过对收集的数据进行分析，结果发现，场独立和高歧义容忍度与受试习得词汇的数量具有显著的相关性，高效词汇习得者与低效词汇习得者在场独立和歧义容忍认知方式上存在显著差异。
本研究的结果对中国的英语词汇教学具有一定的理论和实践意义。首先，它肯定了认知方式在附带词汇习得中的作用，说明语言学习者在认知方式上的个体差异对语言学习过程有一定的影响。其次，它有利于中国英语教师鼓励学生进行大量的课外阅读以扩大词汇量。1430