Harmonizing different cognitive styles through reading

Abstract

With the present day clipping consciousness domination, it is of primary importance to develop reading competences taking into consideration students’ different cognitive styles, i.e. the way the learners think and perceive information as well as remember it. As it has been established, cognitive styles are not homogenous, thus providing the opportunity to subdivide students into convergent and divergent learners. Development of special exercises is required to eliminate psycho-methodological variations undesirable in terms of language acquisition and differences between different types of thinking as well as to harmonize the learners’ cognitive styles in the course of reading. Although people are born with different cognitive styles that determine the specificities in their perception and generation of texts, it is possible to minimize the cognitive styles differences by means of various activities that call for a special study in the field under consideration. The article deals with the use of descriptive-analytical method and comparativecontrastive analysis to discover the cognitive similarities and differences between convergent cognitive style learners and divergent cognitive style learners. The study is based on the proposition that cognitive psychology strategies should be used to eliminate the learners’ cognitive style differentiations and develop the learners reading competences in the course of their ways of thinking harmonization.