The Relationship Among Tolerance Of Ambiguity, Anxiety And Academic Achievement Of Listening Comprehension

English learning is a rather complex process. During the process of English learning. English learners may confront all kinds of differences in his mother language, including pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, discourse structure and even cultural background. Therefore, it is evitable for an English learner to experience ambiguities during the process of learning. Tolerance of ambiguity is first defied by psychologist Frenkel-Brunswik in1949. Tolerance of ambiguity refers to the learners’ different attitudes toward ambiguities. During the process of learning, the learners may confront a lot of ambiguous, unfamiliar or uncertain situations, students with different level of tolerance of ambiguity may have different attitudes, their attitude may rang from absolute reception to negative resistance. In the field of foreign language learning, more and more researchers have drawn their attention to tolerance of ambiguity, which is considered as one of the important factors that can influence foreign language learning. Learners who have higher level of tolerance of ambiguity tend to cope with the ambiguities more easily and they can achieve a better performance in language learning. While learners with lower level of tolerance of ambiguity may feel nervous or anxious when they are confronting ambiguities, and they are tend to have poorer performance in language learning. In addition, affective factors also play an important role in language learning. Anxiety is one of the important affective factors. Many researches indicate that high level of anxiety would have a negative effect on language learning. Listening is one of the important and basic skills of language learning and it is also the difficult point for many English learners. Many researchers consider listening comprehension as a high anxiety provoking and problematic process. Compared with other skills, listening comprehension is rather special, during the process, learners could only listen rather than read the material, and they could not look back, therefore, listening comprehension is also a process that is full of ambiguities.This thesis is trying to explore the relationship among tolerance of ambiguity, anxiety and academia achievement of listening comprehension. During the research, teaching intervention is conducted separately to anxiety and tolerance of ambiguity. According to the exploration of the relationship among the three variables, the thesis is trying to find out whether anxiety and tolerance of ambiguity will cause any influences on students’ listening performance, in order to help the students to improve their listening comprehension performance to some extent.The subjects of the research are from two natural classes from Zhixing College, they are grade two students, non-English majors, in total91students. Data required in the study are obtained from two questionnaires:Ely’s Second Language Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale and The Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale, and listening comprehension of CET-4. All the data are analyzed by SPSS. The findings are shown as followed:1. There is a significantly negative correlation between anxiety and listening comprehension achievement. Students who have lower level of anxiety will have better performance in listening comprehension.2. After the teaching intervention of anxiety, students’ anxiety level significantly reduced, they achieve a better listening comprehension performance and their level of tolerance of ambiguity remains almost the same.3. There is a significantly positive correlation between tolerance of ambiguity and listening comprehension achievement. Students who have higher level of tolerance of ambiguity will achieve better result in listening comprehension.4. After the teaching intervention of tolerance of ambiguity, students’ level of tolerance of ambiguity is significantly improved and their performance in listening comprehension is greatly improves as well, at the same time their anxiety level is significantly reduced.According to the research, we can find that both anxiety and tolerance of ambiguity play an important role in listening comprehension. To improve the level of tolerance of ambiguity and to reduce the anxiety level can both contribute to improving listening comprehension achievement, and the improvement of the level of tolerance of ambiguity can lead to a reduction in anxiety as well. To explore the relationship among the three variables can help teachers to improve students’ listening performance better.