Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Cognitive style
The term ‘cognitive style’ refers to a technical psychological distinction between
typical ways of thinking. Imagine standing in a room that is slowly leaning to one
side without the people inside it knowing. Some people attempt to stand upright,
others lean so that they are parallel to the walls. Those who lean have a field-
dependent (FD) cognitive style; that is, their thinking relates to their surround-
ings. Those who stand upright have a field-independent (FI) style; they think
independently of their surroundings. The usual test for cognitive style is less dra-
matic, relying on distinguishing shapes in pictures and is thus called the embed-
ded figures test. Those who can pick out shapes despite confusing backgrounds are
field-independent, those who cannot are field-dependent. My own informal
check is whether a person adjusts pictures that are hanging crookedly or does not.
These are tendencies rather than absolutes; any individual is somewhere on the
continuum between the poles of FI and FD.
A difference in cognitive style might well make a difference to success in L2 learn-
ing – another aspect of aptitude. Most researchers have found that a tendency
towards FI (field independence) helps the student with conventional classroom
learning (Alptekin and Atakan, 1990). This seems obvious in a sense, in that formal
education in the West successively pushes students up the rungs of a ladder of
abstraction, away from the concrete (Donaldson, 1978). Hansen and Stansfield
(1981) used three tests with L2 learners: those that measured the ability to commu-
nicate, those that measured linguistic knowledge, and those that measured both
together. FI learners had slight advantages for communicative tasks, greater advan-
tages for academic tasks, and the greatest advantages for the combined tasks.
However, Bacon (1987) later found no differences between FD and FI students in
terms of how much they spoke and how well they spoke. This illustrates again the
interaction between student and teaching method; not all methods suit all students.
Cognitive style varies to some extent from one culture to another. There are vari-
ations between learners on different islands in the Pacific and between different
sexes, though field independence tends to go with good scores on a cloze test
(Hansen, 1984). Indeed, there are massive cross-cultural differences in these meas-
ures. To take Chinese as an example, first of all there is a general cultural difference
between East and West as to the importance of foreground versus background,
which affects the issue; second, the embedded figures test does not work, since peo-
ple who are users of character-based scripts find it much easier to see embedded fig-
ures, and other tests have to be used (Nisbett, 2003).
There is no general reason why FI people in general should be better or worse at
cognitive functioning than those who are FD. FI and FD are simply two styles of
Are other personality traits important to L2 learning? 151

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thinking. A challenge has been posed to the use of FI/FD in second language
acquisition by Roger Griffiths and Ronald Sheen (1992), who argue that the con-
cept has not been sufficiently well defined in the research and is no longer of
much interest within the discipline of psychology, from which it came.