Correlation Analysis Between College Student’s Tolerance Of Ambiguity And Their Performance In Different Listening Tasks

It has been widely concerned that listening comprehension plays an important role in foreignlanguage learning and intercultural communication. The proportion of listening part in reformed CET-4has been obviously increased to35%. The listening achievement of students is not only influenced by thelistening tasks but also the cognitive style. Tolerance of Ambiguity as a kind of important cognitive stylerefers to learner s ability to perceive and deal with the ambiguous and uncertain information in SecondLanguage Acquisition. In the complex process of English listening, listeners are not only confronted withthe existed ambiguous phenomenon of English itself but faced with the uncertainty due to the non-totalcorrespondence in pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, meaning, pragmatics and culture between Chineseand English. Based on it, the purpose of this research is to investigate the correlation between collegestudents Tolerance of Ambiguity and their performance in different listening tasks in an empirical way.126juniors in non-English major were chosen as its subjects from one university in Shan Xi.Questionnaire of TOA and CET-4listening test were adopted. Then the data was collected to makeanalysis in SPSS19.0and the results are as follows:1TOA of most non-English major students is at the middle level. The three kinds of ambiguoussituations (high-speed utterance, unfamiliarity with cultural background and long&difficult words andgrammars) mostly affect students level of TOA.2There is a positive correlation between non-English major students TOA and their listeningperformance for two different response types, but the correlation is more significant in selected response(p<0.01) than that in constructed response (p<0.05). One-way ANOVA analysis shows that students withlow level of TOA perform worst in both selected response and constructed response; students with highlevel of TOA perform better than those with middle level of TOA for selected response; but for theconstructed response, there is no significant difference between the students with high level of TOA andthe middle ones.3From the perspective of question types, there is a significant positive correlation between students TOA and their listening performance when answering inference questions; but there s no correlationbetween them when answering detail questions. One-way ANOVA analysis shows: for inferencequestions, listeners with high level of TOA perform the best; those with middle level of TOA perform better and those with low level of TOA perform worst; but there is no significant difference among themwhen dealing with detail questions.Based on the above results, the study suggests that teachers pay attention to and know about TOA ofstudents clearly, then make corresponding class arrangement and assign homework according to theirdifferent characteristics. Students should be fully aware of their level of TOA and work on thecorresponding exercises instead of blindly burying in the ocean of papers.