Correlation Study Of Tolerance Of Ambiguity And Writing Strategies In Senior High School English Wirting Process

The objective of English teaching in senior high school pays attention to the overalldevelopment of students’ abilities in listening, speaking, reading and writing. As a result, thecultivation of writing ability plays a significant role in second language teaching. However,during their writing, students may confront with confused situations due to the differences inwords, phrases, expressions, cultures between Chinese and English. Different individuals’attitudes towards the confusion may affect students’ writing performance. That is to say,successful second language learning claims proper degrees of tolerance of ambiguity which isone of the individual differences. Furthermore, many researchers have found that mediatetolerance of ambiguity contributes to the success of second language learning.The present study aimed to study what the proper degrees of tolerance of ambiguity iswhen students are assigned to write. What’s more, students also apply different writingstrategies which can influence students’ writing performances. The study is designed to studythe influence of TOA on the choices and adoption of writing strategies. In order to find out theresults,132senior high school students were chosen as the subjects and the research used twoquestionnaires as well as a writing test as the research instruments. The two questionnairesand the composition were measured under the supervision of the researcher to ensure thevalidity and reliability of the present study. With the help of SPSS, the author did descriptiveanalyses of the present status of tolerance of ambiguity of senior high school students andcorrelation between different levels of tolerance of ambiguity and writing strategies, that is,how different levels of tolerance of ambiguity influence the adoption of writing strategies.The results showed that the participants are divided into three groups with high, mediumand low tolerance of ambiguity. The number of students with extremely high and low TOA islittle and most students are with mediate level. The findings showed that no significantcorrelation was found between tolerance of ambiguity and language learners’ writingproficiency. However, learners with medium level of tolerance of ambiguity gained higherwriting scores than students with high or low tolerance of ambiguity. As for writing strategies,the three groups almost have the similar frequency of using writing strategies in total, but thespecific use of writing strategies differed greatly. Learners with high tolerance of ambiguity tend to use metacognitive strategy whereas students with low tolerance of ambiguity tend touse cognitive strategy, compensation strategy and social strategy. The middle tolerance ofambiguity group tends to use affective strategy more often.From the results and conclusions, it is suggested that in actual classroom teaching,teachers should pay attention to the cultivation of students’ proper degree of tolerance ofambiguity. Besides, teachers should help students with extremely high or low TOA to usewriting strategies more efficiently. In addition, in the future studies, more subjects should bementioned to ensure a large sample and the time duration should be longer in order to deepenthe study of second language writing.