A Study On The Correlation Between Tolerance Of Ambiguity And Junior Middle School Students’ English Listening Scores

In the field of psychology was the tolerance of ambiguity first proposed by scholars abroad.In the field of language learning,it refers to the degree to which learners are cognitively willing to tolerate ideas and propositions that are different from learner’s belief system or structure of knowledge(Brown,2002).It belongs to one of the learner’s learning styles.Because there are many differences,such as pronunciation,vocabulary,grammar,cultural background and so on between mother tongue and target language,learners are prone to language ambiguity in the process of English learning,which affects the learning achievement.The main factor of language ambiguity is learners’ tolerance of ambiguity.Language learning is a complex internalization process.In the process of language input and fusion,tolerance of ambiguity,as a factor in affective domain,will affect the amount of language filtering,the speed and quality of language learning,and ultimately affects the learning resultsListening is not only one of the main ways for students to obtain information and language input,but also one of the language skills that students should have a good command of.Studies have shown that the listening skill learners apply in real language communication has accounted to 45%(Lin,2008).In modern society,the transition from printed text to the voice-mediated media has become an indisputable fact,so higher requirements have been put forward for the level of listening comprehension in second language learning(Hedge,2002).At the same time,the National English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2011 Edition)stipulates students are required to reach Grade 5 by the end of Year 9.In terms of listening,junior middle school graduates should be able to understand statements about familiar topics,participate in group discussions,understand the speaker’s intention,the main idea of each paragraph,the relationship of cause and effect,record simple information and so on.However,under the pressure of Junior Middle School or High School Entrance Examination,most English teaching pays more attention to the training of students’ “reading”and “writing” skills,usually neglecting the training of “listening”.Because listening comprehension materials have the characteristics of unknown,randomness and time-limitation,it is one of the difficulties for learners to deal with the information entering the brain immediately.As a necessary stage for each student,Year Nine is an important turning point in English learning,which is directly related to students’ continuous interest and learning effectiveness.As one of the important links of communication,listening will affect students’ daily communication and information transmission if it is not trained and improved in education.Therefore,based on the theory of learning style,Stephen Krashen’s affective filter hypothesis,and language ego,this paper takes the tolerance of ambiguity and junior middle school students’ listening scores in the learning of English as the research points,and choose the randomly selected two classes of Year Nine from a middle school in Chongqing as the research object.Thus,the correlation between tolerance of ambiguity and junior middle school students’ listening scores can be explored.The specific research questions are as follows:(1)What is the general situation of junior middle school students’ tolerance of ambiguity and their tolerance of ambiguity in the four aspects(pronunciation,vocabulary,grammar,discourse)of listening comprehension?(2)what is the correlation between tolerance of ambiguity and listening scores? What kind of correlation does it show?(3)Are there any disparities in tolerance of ambiguity between groups with high and low listening scores? Is this disparity significant?By using SPSS 26.0,the listening scores of junior middle school students and scores of ELTAS are sorted out and analyzed in detail.The research results are displayed as follows:(1)The general situation of junior middle school students’ tolerance of ambiguity and the tolerance of ambiguity in the aspects of listening(pronunciation,vocabulary,grammar,text)are at the moderate level,and some students’ have a relatively low level of tolerance of ambiguity.(2)There is a significant correlation between tolerance of ambiguity and listening achievement,and this is a positive correlation.Tolerance of ambiguity has a strong predictive power on the listening performance of junior middle school students and it is an important factor affecting the listening comprehension achievement of junior middle school students.(3)There is significant disparity in the tolerance of ambiguity between groups with high and low listening scores.The disparity difference shows in phonetic,lexical,grammatical and textual aspects of learning of English listening.The results illustrate that tolerance of ambiguity has a significant effect on junior middle school students’ English listening performance.Students with high level of tolerance of ambiguity have obvious advantages in learning of English listening.Based on the research results,this research has also put forward some teaching suggestions for listening comprehension to improve teaching and learning effectiveness.