The Influence Of Ambiguity Tolerance On Chinese College Students During Their English Learning

English and Chinese belong to two different kinds of language systems, which have hardly the equal language phenomena. Then, during learning English, Chinese college students must encounter and have encountered language uncertainty and ambiguity whether in pronunciation, vocabulary or syntax and so on. How do they avoid all of these uncertainties and tolerate all of these ambiguous phenomena during the foreign language learning? Nowadays, more and more linguists and researchers recognize the influence of the cognitive style on the foreign language learning. Tolerance of ambiguity (TA) is paid more and more attention to by them as a cognitive category of cognitive-psychology. This study aims at exploring the relationship between ambiguity tolerance (TA) and language level or proficiency.Participants in this study were 109 non-English majors from three different levels of universities. Second language tolerance of ambiguity scale was selected to assess the degree of ambiguity tolerance of all the participants. After that, statistical analyses were conducted with SPSS (statistical package for social science), version 12.0.Based on the literature available, the statistical analyses and some observations, the following conclusions are obtained: 1. Students have different degrees of TA during they learn English language. And most students have the middle level of TA, few have the high and low levels of TA. 2. The TA difference in gender is not statistically significant although the male students are slightly more tolerant than female students. 3. Correlation analyses show that there is negatively statistical correlation between TA and age, but slightly. It is likely that there is no significant relationship between TA and age during their studying English language. 4. Correlation analysis illustrates that there is no significant correlation between TA and time for reading English, participation in English activities, learning initiatives, time for learning English outside class and family education background. 5. There is statistical correlation between TA and English language proficiency. They are positively correlated, but not strongly. The author also tentatively analyzes the relationship between TA and culture, learning strategies and styles, and ego-orientation.The findings of the present investigation have both theoretical and pedagogical implications and may provide insights into both the language learning process and language teaching method.