A Study Of TOA And The Correlation Between TOA And English Achievements

When the learners are studying the second language, they stand in an unfamiliar situation,where different backgrounds, syntatic sentence structures are likely to bring the obstacle tolearners. In linguistics, it is called ambiguity. However, restricted by the content of the collegeentrance examination, such as fixed phrases and grammer, English teachers pay muchattention to the accuracy of the knowledge. As a result, it easily makes learners feel confused,threatened and they will even refuse this ambiguity. Due to the entrance exams to the college,the senior high school students experiencing the key period of their life, have to accuratelygrasp grammars, structures, sentence patterns and so on; students have to face all kinds ofquestions or items of the exams, including reading comprehension, cloze, writing, mutiplechoice, listening comprehension and so on. The dissertation tends to study TOA(Tolerance ofAmbiguity) as well as the correlation between TOA and English achievements and tries toanswer the following questions:First, how is the current situation of high school students’ TOA? Second, which one is thehighest in TOA among reading, listening, speaking, wrting and grammar? Third, is there acorrelation between TOA and English achievements of the senior high school students?Based on the previous studies, the writer chose175senior high school students asparticipants, who are from No.1High School in Longkou, adopted Ely’s Second LanguageTolerance of Ambiguity Scale (SLTAS) to carry out a research on TOA from five aspects ofreading, listening, speaking, writing, grammar. After collecting the questionnaires, the writeridentified each questionnaire with a number and analyzed the collected data through thesoftware SPSS17.0. Based on the outcome of SPSS17.0, the writer discussed the TOA as awhole as well as from each aspect. Meanwhile, the writer adopted the English paper of theentrance exam to college in2011to test their achievements. Finally, the correlation betweenTOA and English achievements of the high school students was analyzed through thetwo-tailed test. After this analysis, the writer could get the following findings:Firstly, the level of TOA of senior high school students is relatively low, which meansstudents can’t put up with the unfamiliar, complicated situation. Among the different aspectsof TOA, students have the lowest TOA in spoken English. They have the lowest tolerance intheir wrong pronunciation and vague expressions, which results in their mute English. It is in the listening that students have the highest TOA, so students can have few difficulties inunderstanding it when hearing some new or unfamiliar information. Secondly, there is apositive correlation between TOA and English achievements. The higher the TOA is, thehigher the achievements are.Therefore, teachers should intend to help students improve their TOA during their teachingactivities. When facing the complex and unfamiliar situation, teachers could instruct studentsto guess based on their pre-existing knowledge so that students could improve their TOA.What’s more, according to different TOA in different aspects, teachers could arrange differentactivities for different tasks and make students have access to studying effectively.