LANGUAGE IN INDIA

DOES COGNITIVE STYLE CONTRIBUTE TO SYSTEMATIC VARIANCE IN COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TESTS?
Mohammad Ali Salmani-Nodoushan, PhD in TEFL

PROFICIENCY AND LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE

For some years, proficiency was widely equated in the literature with linguistic competence. More recently, however, the concept of proficiency has broadened to include competence in the use of language for communication, comprising strategic, sociolinguistic, and discourse competence or what Bachman (1990) calls communicative language ability (cf. S. Anivan, 1991; J. C. Alderson, 1991).

ASSESSMENT OF LEARNERS' PROGRESS AND CONTROL OF VOCABURAY AND GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURES

Unfortunately, though, even where classroom activity may reflect this contemporary, expanded view of proficiency, the assessment of learners' progress has generally continued to focus almost exclusively on control of vocabulary and grammatical structures, representing only linguistic competence. In other words, many classroom activities, and most testing procedures, focus on manipulation of foreign language forms, while minimizing attention to social function and meaning.

THE IRANIAN SITUATION

The present study aimed at investigating whether field (in)dependence introduced systematic variance into Iranian EFL learners' performance on communicative tests. The idea behind this project was that field-dependent subjects wouldperform better than field-independent subjects on communicative tests. In other words, it aimed at investigating whether there is any meaningful difference between filed independent subjects' performance on communicative tests and that of filed dependent subjects? It was hypothesized that there was such a difference.

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

The concepts and methods derived from work on cognitive style over the past two-and-a-half decades are being applied at an ever increasing rate to research on problems of education. Among the cognitive styles identified to date, the fielddependence- independence dimension has been the most extensively studied and has had the widest application to educational problems. While research on educational applications is still in its early stages, the evidence that research has already produced suggests that a cognitive style approach may be applied with profit to a variety of educational issues.

AN OVERALL VIEW

Recent language testing research investigates factors other than language proficiency that may be responsible for systematic variance in language test performance. One such factor is the test takers' cognitive styles. The present study was carried out with the aim of finding the probable effects of Iranian EFL learners' cognitive styles on their performance on communicative tests.

For purposes of the present study, it was hypothesized that field (in)dependence would introduce systematic variance into Iranian EFL learners' communicativetest performance. 240 junior and senior students all majoring in English took the Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT), the 1990 version of IELTS, and the Communicative Test (CT) designed for the present study. The results of the present study provided evidence that the field-dependent (FD) subjects, compared to their field independent (FI) counterparts, performed much better on the CT. It was, therefore, concluded that test takers' cognitive styles may be viewed as a source of systematic variance in performance on communicative language tests.

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