Cognitive style means the style of inpidual expressed in the process of information processing on cognitive organization and cognitive function. It not only includes the differences about the inpidual perception, memory, thinking, but also includes differences in inpidual attitude, motivation cognitive function and cognitive abilities. Riding defined cognitive styles as a relatively stable feature of a person (127). It is static and fairly in-built characteristics of the person. Cognitive styles have certain stability and it will influence many aspects of inpiduals. For example, cognition, memory, thinking, understanding and solving problems, making decisions, etc.. It encourages people to form a preference attitude and habitual way in this process. That is to say, cognitive style is a different tendencies of inpidual embodied in the process of processing information from the outside world. It is stable in many cases and will not easily change. Field independence and field dependence are the main dimension of cognitive styles and also are the fields been researched earliest within all dimensions of cognitive style. It is performed more clearly and directly than other cognitive style in daily life and constitutes the theoretical framework of cognitive style.

Field independence and Field Dependence Cognitive style was first discovered in 1940s by American psychologist Witkin. Witkin pointed out that field dependent people have difficulties in finding hidden figures which has similar geometric lines from background while field independent people can quickly find out graphics and ignore the background (661). In other words, when presenting a dominant field, field independent inpiduals more tend to overcome the field’s organization or rebuild it and will less influenced by the environment. In addition, field independent people show a greater interest on all kinds of things and prefer to see things in the way of analysis. Inpiduals of field dependent tend to depend on the given field and more easily affected by environment and other people, especially has the preference of referring to someone else’s perceptions and behaviors.

Reading is usually defined as an access to gain information from visual material. Urquart & Weir regarded reading as the skill of transforming printed words into spoken words (16).The definition just pay attention to the presentation of reading, only stress the recognition process of letters and words in reading process. With the deepening of research on reading, people soon realized that reading is a decoding process and a process of language input. Reader needs coordination of various organs, the structure of knowledge and skills in the process of reading. Reading is a psychological process. Rumelhart pointed out that reading is a two-way process which contented both decoding of the text and analysis of the article, the two should be combined with each other (573). It is a process in which readers and reading materials to establish understanding, the reader experience a series of activities like，forecast, verification and final judgment of thinking. In turn, these activities are as a tool of thinking in the shape of language knowledge. Goodman proposed reading involves three aspects: syntactic knowledge, semantic knowledge, writing and speech knowledge (126). According to cognitive psychology, cognitive learning theory defined reading as a process in which readers capture text information through vision, then decode the information and extract the meaning.

II. The Impact of Field Independence and Field Dependence on English Reading

Reading is a complicated cognitive process. According to cognitive psychology, cognitive learning theory defined reading as a process in which readers capture text information through vision, then decode the information and extract the meaning. Students has different cognitive styles in the learning process will exhibit different learning characteristics. Cognitive styles are stressed as an important dimension to measure inpidual differences in English reading for a long time. Field independent and field dependent college students have obvious differences in all aspects of English reading.