A Study Of The Correlation Between English Majors’ Tolerance Of Ambiguity And Their English News Listening Performance

Tolerance of Ambiguity (TOA). as one of the most important affective factors and learning styles, has attracted more and more attention from the researchers both at home and abroad. Many scholars believe that TOA, to some extent, will affect learners’L2learning, and proper and moderate TOA are needed by successful language learners. English news listening, with its abundant information and authentic resources, is an effective teaching and learning material to enhance English learners’ listening, but it is also a difficult point for English learning. However, research on TOA mainly focuses on its relationship with reading or overall English, few with listening, even less with English news listening. Against such a research background, the present study set English majors as its subjects, the relationship between TOA and English news listening as its content, which aims to improve students’news listening performance.The present study aims to study the following three research questions:1) What is the general tendency of English majors’level of TOA?(1) What are the ambiguous situations that students can tolerate most?(2) What are the ambiguous situations that students can tolerate least?2) What is the correlation between English majors’TOA and their news listening performance?(1) What is the correlation between good news listening performers’TOA and their news listening performance?(2) What is the correlation between poor news listening performers’TOA and their news listening performance?3) How do factors influence the correlation between English majors’TOA and their news listening performance?(1) How do factors influence the correlation in terms of difficulty index?(2) How do factors influence the correlation in terms of news source country (country where the news takes place)?The theoretical framework is based on Krashen’s Input Theory, Affective Filter Hypothesis, and Ego Boundary Theory. The quantitative research design was employed in the study by means of questionnaire and test. Participants were105freshmen of English majors enrolled in the year of2011in School of Foreign Studies Yangzhou University.103valid questionnaires were collected. Data collected was analyzed by SPSS17.0.The findings of this research are listed below:1) The statistical result shows that the mean TOA score is3.2913, and subjects’general TOA tendency stays in a moderate and low degree, accounting for61.2%and35.0%percent. Few students have high level of TOA, accounting for only3.9%. Word guessing (mean score=2.50), cultural difference (mean score=2.67) and difference in expression ways (mean score=2.96) are the top three ambiguous situations students can tolerate most; Homonym (mean score=4.01), English grammar (mean score=3.86) and listening speed (mean score=3.69) are the top three ambiguous situations students can tolerate least in listening.2) There exists a significant positive correlation between English majors’TOA level and news listening performance (p=.002<0.01). It shows the higher level of TOA a student has, the more successful he or she tends to be in news listening test. There is a significant positive correlation between good English news performers’TOA and their news listening performance (p=.018<0.05) while there is no significant correlation between poor news listening performers’ TOA scores and news listening scores (p=.075>0.05), indicating that TOA do not have any effect for those students who are not good at news listening.3) When analyzing factors influencing the correlation between students’TOA and news listening comprehension from the perspective of difficulty index, it is found that there is a negative correlation between English majors’TOA scores and easy item scores(r=-.362**), which is significant at the0.01level; the correlation between TOA scores and medium item scores are also significant at0.05level (r=-.196*). Since the higher TOA score is, the lower level of TOA a student has, so there is a significant positive correlation between English majors’ level of TOA and their news listening performance in easy and medium items. There is no significant correlation between TOA and news listening performance (r=-.029, p=.771) when question items are too difficult.4) The correlation between students’TOA and their news listening scores at home is significant at0.05level (r=-.212*), while the correlation between students’TOA and their news listening scores abroad is significant at0.01level (r=-.265**), showing that English majors’ TOA scores are more closely related to their news listening scores abroad, which means, news source country plays a key role in the correlation between subjects’TOA and their new listening performance.Several pedagogical implications can be drawn from the present study:(1) Based on the fact that most students do not have high levels of TOA, teachers should help students develop a relatively higher or moderate level of TOA, and treat it as a normal and natural part of learning process instead of avoiding ambiguous situations.(2) Teachers should help students choose appropriate news listening materials. Since students’TOA will not make any influence on their news listening comprehension when the material is too difficult, it is advisable to select authentic and proper news listening materials within students’ability.(3) Teachers should train students to make full use of background knowledge and teach them words and expressions frequently used in news listening. It can help students do the news listening tests concerning international events better, which will also make the students with lower level of TOA more relaxed during listening process and perform better in news listening abroad.