An Empirical Study Of The Influence Of Tolerance Of Ambiguity On Communication Strategy

Although the study about communicative strategies (CSs) and the tolerance of ambiguity (TA) is very rich, there are relatively fewer researches about the correlation between the TA and use of CSs. The ultimate purpose of learning a language is for communication and possessing the communicative ability, and one of the necessary methods to improve communicative skills is the effective use of communication strategy. And also the researchers overseas have done a lot of theoretical and empirical studies on communication strategy which have laid a solid theoretical foundation in this field. Although previous studies on CSs are adequate, and have been carried out for many years, there still exist controversies on relevant issues about the CSs researches and the study perspectives need broadening, and some views are yet to be systematically analyzed. At the same time, English learning is a long and complicated process, and also the effect of study is affected by many factors, including the tolerance of ambiguity which is treated as one of the most important aspects of individual factors and draws more and more attention in the field of language acquisition.The participants selected for the research are153in total from China University of Petroleum, including56students of English majors and97students of non-English majors. This paper employs two kinds of scales:the scale of tolerance of ambiguity which is the Second Language of Tolerance of Ambiguity designed by Ely (1995) and the communication strategy scale that has been modified by the author based on predecessors’research results and the author’s own pilot study. The study was carried out, aiming to find out the level of TA of college students and the correlation of TA and CSs.After the survey and analysis, the present study has the following findings:(1) The TA is highly and positively correlated with the reduction strategies and L2-based strategy respectively;(2) The TA and paralanguage strategy have certain relationship, but the correlation is not significant;(3) The TA shows negative correlation with the cooperative strategy, in other words, the higher degree of TA is, the less use of cooperative strategy becomes;(4) The TA is not related to stalling strategy;(5) Certain differences of TA and the use of communication strategy respectively are found as to different genders and different majors.The present study is only an attentive research with the purpose of improving learners’ communication strategy. This paper attempts to explore the correlation between TA and communication strategy by the method of questionnaire survey. And at the end of the thesis, some proposal are put forward so as to offer a modest spur to trigger more valuable and deeper contributions in this field which would be helpful for English teaching and learning.