A Study On The Relationship Among Tolerance Of Ambiguity,Reading Anxiety And English Reading Achievement Of Rural Senior High School Students

Reading is one of the important ways for people to acquire knowledge.Reading teaching plays an important part in English teaching,so it has always been paid attention to by teachers and students.Improving students’ reading comprehension is one of the important tasks of English teaching in high school.In the process of language learning,learners are inevitably influenced by cognitive and emotional factors.Tolerance of ambiguity as a cognitive factor plays an important role in the process of foreign language learning.In the reading process,learners need to accept and organize a large amount of language information.Owing to the different language system between English and Chinese,a certain degree of tolerance of ambiguity is very important for the success in English reading and learning.Similarly,when learners encounter problems that they cannot solve or fail to meet their desirable goals,they probably suffer from various kinds of anxiety which will affect their normal academic performance.Reading anxiety is often considered to be one of the important emotional factors that affect reading performance.Many scholars have done a lot of researches on the tolerance of ambiguity and foreign language reading anxiety respectively,but there are few studies on the relationship between them;also,the subjects of these previous researches are mainly the non-English major college students.Thus,this study tries to explore the relationships among the tolerance of ambiguity(TOA),foreign language reading anxiety(FLRA)and English reading achievement(ERA)of rural senior high students.In this study,256 students from 6 classes in the high school of Hongdao Middle School were selected as the subjects,and the level of their foreign language reading anxiety and tolerance of ambiguity are measured by tests,questionnaires and interviews,which means the author of this thesis has adopted both qualitative and quantitative research methods in her study.The research questions are as follows:1.What is the status quo of tolerance of ambiguity and English reading anxiety in rural high school students?2.What are the correlations among tolerance of ambiguity,English reading anxiety and reading achievement in rural high school students?3.Are there any significant differences in terms of the tolerance of ambiguity and English reading anxiety of different genders and groups? If yes,what are the differences?4.To what degree can the tolerance of ambiguity and English reading anxiety affect the rural high school students’ English reading achievement?After the collection of the data,the author used SPSS21.0 to analyse the corresponding results of the questionnaires and found that:First of all,the tolerance of ambiguity of rural high school students in the examination was at a moderate level,while their English reading anxiety was a little above the middle level.Secondly,the tolerance of ambiguity and foreign language reading anxiety of the rural high school students in the examination had a negative correlation.Moreover,subjects of different genders had significant differences in reading anxiety and tolerance of ambiguity,and boys had higher reading anxiety and lower tolerance of ambiguity than girls.There were significant differences in terms of the tolerance of ambiguity and English reading anxiety in the high-score and low-score group.The students in high-score group had higher tolerance of ambiguity than those from the low-score group,and their English reading anxiety level was lower than that of the low-score group.Finally,tolerance of ambiguity and reading anxiety could predict English reading achievement to a certain extent respectively.Tolerance of ambiguity could explain and affect the reading score up to 19.2%,while reading anxiety,which could predict and affect the reading score as high as 31.3%,has higher interpretation than the tolerance of ambiguity.Both TOA and FLRA as the predictors can explain the 34.3% of the change of the rural high school students’ English reading achievement.All in all,this study aimed to investigate the current high school students’ reading anxiety and tolerance of ambiguity,and their impact on reading performance.Hopefully,it would help teachers and students recognize the impact of anxiety and tolerance on language learning so as to improve the efficiency of students’ English reading comprehension.