This paper presents the results of a research study carried out with students of China University of Geosciences to analyze the influence of readers' cognitive styles (field dependent/field neutral/field independent) and reading strategies on their reading performance, including the total reading score, global inference questions, factual and detail questions, main idea questions, lexical inference questions. Results show the correlations between cognitive style and most of the reading questions are not statistically significant, except for the total reading scores and performance of global inference question. One-way ANOVA shows that there is significant difference between the FN and FD group in total reading score and global inference question. However, when the reading strategies have been partialled out of the correlations between cognitive style and reading scores, the remaining correlation with the total reading score and global inference and lexical inference reaches significance. This indicates the different information processing of FD/FI learners and the important role of direct reading strategies for all learners. Teachers can help their students become more effective readers by encouraging them to apply direct reading strategies, and apply different indirect reading strategies based on their different cognitive styles.
