A Study On The Correlation Between Tolerance Of Ambiguity And Reading Comprehension

Over the past decades, people are becoming increasingly aware of the important role cognitive style plays in second language acquisition. Tolerance of Ambiguity (TOA) is one of the cognitive variables which are infrequently explored despite its practical implications for language learning and teaching. Reading comprehension ability is widely regarded as one of the most important comprehensive abilities in second language acquisition. Therefore, it is an important research task to discover the factors that have an effect on the students'reading comprehension and the ways to improve their reading comprehension abilities.Tolerance of Ambiguity can also be called "Ambiguity Tolerance", which is closely related to people's cognitive styles. Whether one is tolerant depends on his/her reactions to ambiguous situations. If he/she regards ambiguous situations as threatening, he/she owns lower tolerance of ambiguity or he/she is an ambiguity intolerant person; on the contrary, if he/she considers ambiguous situations to be desirable, then he/she has higher tolerance of ambiguity or he/she is an ambiguity tolerant person.The study is based on Ely and Budner's theories about TOA, involving 121 freshmen from Yancheng Normal University, and mainly employs the tools of questionnaire and reading comprehension test, using SPSS 13.0 and think aloud protocols to describe and analyze the collected data and materials. It tries to explore the relationship between college students' tolerance of ambiguity and their reading comprehension achievements. Meanwhile, it tries to figure out whether the gender index has some effect on the relationship between tolerance of ambiguity and reading comprehension achievements.Based on the statistical analyses mentioned above, the following conclusions are obtained:1) There is a positive correlation between TOA and students' overall reading comprehension; Higher TOA tends to lead to better achievements in reading.2) Both skills of drawing inference and reading for specific details are correlated with TOA. Students' skill of reading for inference is more related to TOA when it is compared with his skill of reading for specific details.3) Significant difference can be seen between male students and female students on the relationship between TOA and their reading comprehension test. This paper then makes tentative discussions about the above findings and asserts that they support the active role of TOA in reading comprehension. Based on this, the writer offers some useful suggestions to English language learning and teaching. As for the purpose of this study, it means to attract teachers and learners' attention to the relevant issues and provide both theoretical and pedagogical implications to reading teaching. And it may provide insights into both the language learning process and the language teaching method.