A Research On TOA And Anxiety Of College Students Based On The Foreign Language Reading Teaching

In the process of foreign language learning, there are a great number oflearners’ factors that influence the effects of their language learning. Ambiguity,as a linguistic phenomenon, is universal, existing in all languages. Tolerance ofAmbiguity (TOA), as an essential cognitive factor or the attitudes that learnershold, mainly aims at those learning materials, such as ambiguous, unfamiliar oruncertain materials in the process of language learning. In the same way, foreignlanguage anxiety as an important affective variable is paid more attention by thescholars. A large number of researches on this topic of foreign language anxietyhave been made in the past two decades. It is shown that anxiety existspervasively on every aspect of language-learning process.Although there are a lot of studies on both foreign language reading anxietyand tolerance of ambiguity by foreign language scholars, researches concerningthe relationship between the two factors are relatively scarce. This thesis intendsto explore the relationship between TOA and foreign language anxiety in orderto offer some useful implications for college English teaching.The participants selected for this thesis were130sophomores with differentmajors from Xi’an Polytechnic University. All the data were collected by thequestionnaires revised from the Second Language Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale(Ely,1995), Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (Satio,1999), and only120were obtained. With the help of SPSS13.0(statistical package for socialscience), comparison of mean, std. deviation, descriptive statistics, Pearsoncorrelation, and etc, were conducted and analyzed to explore the relationshipbetween college students’ TOA and language anxiety. The following are the research conclusions:1. Moderate TOA exceeds both the high and low level of TOA groups. Andmoderate anxiety group also outnumbers the high and low level of anxietygroups.2. There exist some differences in TOA and language anxiety between maleand female. The results suggest that: female learners’ level of tolerance ofambiguity in foreign language reading is higher than that of the male learners’;their reading anxiety level is lower than that of the male learners’.3. It is shown in the results that the students’ degree of TOA is lowest in thetwo items “It worries me that the teacher teaches us and says everything inEnglish.” and “Once I come across the unfamiliar or new words, I feelimpatient”. By comparison, the degree of TOA is relatively lower in the twosituations “I hate the fact that I have to guess the meaning of the unknown wordsin reading” and “I don’t like the fact that sometimes I can’t find English wordsthat mean the same as some words in my own language.”4. Foreign language reading anxiety exists pervasively among languagelearners. Thus, the two items “I am not satisfied with my achieved proficiencylevel in English reading” and “I am unfamiliar with English culture and ideas”are the largest source of foreign language reading anxiety. It is found that lack ofself-confidence and fear of foreign culture are the main sources. However,pronunciation has little effect on foreign language reading anxiety.5. Through Pearson Correlation analysis, it is verified that an obviousnegative correlation indeed exists between reading anxiety and TOA. That is tosay, the higher TOA the learner is, the lower foreign language reading anxietyhe/she is.