A Study On The Effect Of Tolerance Of Ambiguity And Field Independence On Reading Comprehension

Learners of English acquire and process information through reading, however,their different reading proficiency probably result from their individual differences inlearning styles. This dissertation focuses on the effect of tolerance of ambiguity andfield independence on reading comprehension proficiency.During reading process，learners will encounter a lot of ambiguity phenomena,such as unfamiliar words, different cultural background, complex grammar or long anddifficult sentences. In addition, reading is a complicated cognitive progress, duringwhich learners will restructure and integrate information. Therefore, learners’ readingcomprehension proficiency would be affected by their different degrees of tolerance ofambiguity and field independence.This research is implemented to find out whether these two individual differenceswould affect reading comprehension proficiency. Two tools are employed to collect data:Second Language Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale is used to measure tolerance ofambiguity; Test of Embedded Figures is adopted to measure field independence. The135non-English major freshmen from the University of Electronic Science andTechnology of China are selected as subjects and their scores of reading comprehensionin College English Test Band4are used as reference. Then SPSS17.0is employed fordata analysis. The analysis methods used are Frequency Statistics Analysis, PearsonCorrelation Coefficient Analysis, Independent Sample T-Test, Simple RegressionAnalysis and Multiple Regression Analysis.The results of this research show that:1) Overall, there are no learners withextremely high or extremely low degrees of tolerance of ambiguity and fieldindependence. Both of them are normally distributed.2) Learners’ tolerance ofambiguity and reading comprehension proficiency are positively correlated. Comparedwith learners with low degrees of tolerance of ambiguity, those with high degrees oftolerance of ambiguity perform better in reading comprehension.3) Learners’ fieldindependence and reading comprehension proficiency are positively correlated. Compared with learners with low degrees of field independence, those with highdegrees of field independence perform better in reading comprehension.4) There is apositive correlation between learners’ tolerance of ambiguity and field independence.Reading comprehension proficiency is affected through two paths: a. Tolerance ofambiguity directly influences reading comprehension proficiency. b. Tolerance ofambiguity indirectly influences reading comprehension proficiency through fieldindependence.Also, this study puts forward some tentative suggestions to the teaching andlearning of reading according to the research results.