A Study Of The Correlation Between Non-English Majors’Tolerance Of Ambiguity And English Achievement

Ambiguity tolerance was first proposed in1949by Frenkel-Brunswik, an American psychologist, referring to the way that an individual accepts and deals with ambiguous information when he/she is confronted with a series of unfamiliar, complex and unsure clues. Since the concept was put forward, foreign and domestic researchers have conducted a series of discussions and researches. Ambiguity is a common phenomenon in natural language, which not only exists in the vague situation caused by the language itself, but also may arise during the understanding process from a different language to another language. And English is no exception. In the process of English learning, students need to deal with and absorb a lot of new information, and build them into the existing knowledge system. However, there are great differences between English and Chinese in voice, vocabulary, syntax, discourse and even the cultural background. There is almost no fully equivalent linguistic phenomenon between the two languages. Therefore, it is inevitable that the language learners will encounter the ambiguous phenomenon. As an important factor in individual differences, ambiguity tolerance has been found closely linked with foreign language learning, and has been paid attention to by linguists more and more. However, the researches focused on the correlation between ambiguity tolerance and English achievement for non-English majors are few. Thus it is meaningful to take the non-English majors as research subjects and explore the relationship between ambiguity tolerance and their English achievement, which also has great theoretical and practical significance.Based on overviewing the research about the ambiguity tolerance, the author uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative method, that is, questionnaires and interviews to find out the correlation between non-English students’ TOA and their English achievement. In this paper, a total of107students from non-English majors in Taiyuan Universities of Technology in Shanxi Province participate in the study. Based on the survey, the thesis investigates the following research questions:1. What is the TOA condition of non-English majors as a whole?2. What is the correlation between TOA and students’ English achievement?3. What are the differences of English achievement among the students with different levels of TOA? 4. What are the differences of male and female students in the level of TOA in English learning?The author employs SPSS17.0for quantitative analysis, and the results can be summarized as follows:1. Chinese non-English majors have high, middle and low level of TOA in English language learning. The middle level of TOA students takes up the majority in total subjects; the high and low level of TOA students take up the minority. It is found that the high level of TOA students is the smallest in the whole subjects.2. TOA and students’English achievement is positively related. The higher the level of TOA a student possesses, the higher the student’s English proficiency is.3. There are significant differences among different levels of TOA in students’English achievement. The differences are significant in high TOA level group and low TOA level group, and in high TOA level group and middle TOA level group. While there is no significant difference between middle TOA level group and low TOA level group.4. Male and Female students have differences in overall TOA. The overall TOA of males are higher than that of females, but the TOA of females are significantly higher than that of males in speaking and writing.Based on the analysis of the correlation between TOA and students’English achievement, the paper confirms the positive role of TOA for student’s English learning and obtains the implications based on the results as follows:1. Arousing the learner’s sense of tolerance of ambiguity.2. Arranging tasks reasonably according to the motivation of the learners.3. Cultivating the learners’optimal tolerance of ambiguity.4. Guiding students to make use of some learning strategies in SLA.5. Playing the respective advantages of male and female learners.