A Study On The Correlation Between Application-oriented University Students’ Tolerance Of Ambiguity And Their English Listening Performance

Ambiguity is unavoidable in the process of second language (SL) learning. The attitudes the SL learners take towards the ambiguous situations, to a certain extent, have an impact on second language acquisition (SLA) which involves the development of different kinds of abilities including listening comprehension. Scholars at home and abroad have conducted a lot of researches on tolerance of ambiguity (TOA) and the correlation between TOA and SLA, but few of them focus on the influence of TOA on listening comprehension.This study is made to investigate the correlation between application-oriented university students’ TOA levels and their listening performance, for the purpose of which a survey is conducted. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are adopted. The questions to be answered in the study are as follows:1. What is the overall listening performance and TOA levels of application-oriented university students?2. Are proficient listeners different from ineffective listeners in TOA?3. Is there a TOA difference in terms of gender or major?4. Is there a correlation between the TOA levels of application-oriented university students and their English listening performance? If any, is it positive or negative?This study investigates 282 students from different majors in Anhui Sanlian University, including both English and non-English major students. The instruments used are Ely’s Second Language Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale and listening scores of College English Test Band 4 (CET-4). The data are collected and analyzed by SPSS 17.0. Descriptive analyses are made to investigate the overall listening performance and TOA levels of the students. TOA differences with regard to listening performance, gender and major are explored by using T-test. The relationship between the TOA of application-oriented university students and their listening performance is analyzed by Pearson correlation coefficient. The differences in CET-4 listening scores among students with high, moderate and low levels of TOA are examined by one-way ANOVA. Furthermore,12 interviews are carried out for getting more evidence to make the results of the research more persuasive and reliable. Based on the analyses above, the following findings are concluded:Firstly, the overall listening performance of the application-oriented students is poor. The students are more tolerant in the process of language input than they are in the process of language output. With respect to their English language knowledge, the students have much higher TOA in vocabulary than in grammar. The students, on the whole, possess a lower middle level of TOA.Secondly, the result of the independent-samples T test suggests that the proficient listeners are more tolerant than the ineffective ones and proves that there is a significant difference between the TOA levels of the two groups.Thirdly, the male students’ TOA is slightly higher than the females’, but no significant difference in TOA occurs between the male and the female students. Similarly, the English majors’ TOA is slightly higher than the non-English majors’, but no significant TOA difference is found between them.Finally, as for the relationship between the TOA levels of the students and their English listening performance, the result of Pearson correlation analysis indicates a weak positive correlation. One-Way ANOVA adopted to examine the differences of three TOA levels (high, middle and low) in listening performance shows that the students with high TOA get higher scores than those with middle and low TOA. In other words, the students with high TOA are superior to those with mid-TOA or low TOA in English listening performance. No significant difference in listening performance is found between the students of mid-TOA and low TOA groups.The present research testifies some points of previous findings and enriches the former researches concerning TOA in English listening. It helps to attract the attention of English teachers and learners to ambiguities and ambiguity tolerance and provides some implications for English teaching in application-oriented universities.