Correlation Between Ambiguity Tolerance In Reading And The Quality Of Follow-up Productive Oral Output For Graduates

The concept "ambiguity tolerance (AT)" appeared in the foreign language study field early in the 1950s. As in foreign language learning or teaching, different kinds of ambiguity will be always met, including ambiguity in pronunciation, vocabulary, context, culture and etc., while individuals have different reactions to the ambiguity, which will influence their performance in learning. (Naiman & Frohlich, 1987; Chapelle & Roberts, 1986; Ely, 1989; McLain, 1993). Different relationships have been studied by many experts, such as AT and English learning score, AT and listening result, AT and reading performance. Since there are few AT studies referring to the oral output, the present thesis will put the focus on it. The research question is: while meeting ambiguity in reading materials, is there a correlation between the learners' different degrees of ambiguity tolerance and their follow-up oral output quality? Another research question is attached: Which aspects of oral output will be affected by AT? The author also attempts to make a research on the gender difference of the correlation between AT and oral output.The author has chosen 45 (32 female, 13 male) education postgraduate students from a University in Beijing as the research subject, and adopted the methods of questionnaire, tests, etc. A modified scale for ambiguity tolerance was used to get the score of the AT; two oral tests (retelling after reading) was carried out, as the first one without ambiguous situation while the second contains some ambiguous parts which will not influence the main idea of the passage. Under the strict experimental operation, the author considered that the gap between the first test score and the second one is influenced by ambiguity. After the data were collected, SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science) 14.0 has been used to conduct the data analysis. The thesis tried to find the influence of AT on the oral output quality followed reading ambiguous passages, and got the following conclusions: 1. Ambiguity tolerance in reading is correlated with the quality of follow-up productive oral output for Postgraduate Students. The higher the AT is, the better the quality of the follow-up oral output will be. On the contrary, the less tolerant students get lower scores in follow-up oral tests after reading ambiguous passages. 2. Ambiguity tolerance lays the influence on three aspects of oral production: correctness, completeness and fluency, but no influence on the other two aspects: pronunciation and communicative competence. 3. Meanwhile, there is gender difference in the correlation between AT and oral output. AT is correlated with the quality of oral output for female English learners, whereas for male learners, there is no significant correlation found.This thesis provided a tentative discussion on the research results. Some limitations also lay in the research, but the findings of which suggest some implications on second language learning and teaching. It will also offer insights into the future study.