A Correlative Study On The Tolerance Of Ambiguity And Listening Strategies Employed By The English Majors

Tolerance of ambiguity is brought up by Frenkel in 1949 as a psychological variable. She defined it as a "tendency of resort to black-white solutions, to arrive at premature closure as to evaluative aspects, often at the neglect of reality, and to seek for unqualified and unambiguous overall acceptance and rejection of other people." Since language learning is a complex internalization process, as one of the affective variables, tolerance of ambiguity decides the filter of language, the speed and quality of language learning, and even influences the final learning outcome in language input and fusion.Listening comprehension is a rather complex psychological speech comprehension. For a long time, researchers have been concerned with listening comprehension from the perspective of cognitive science, psychology, psycho-linguistics and pragmatics, but rarely had there any researches on the contribution of affective factors of listening comprehension. Listening comprehension is the most important skill in second language learning. The ubiquitous uncertainties in listening will arouse the learner’s anxiety, weaken self-confidence and motivation, and end in less achievement in learning. Therefore, as a major emotional factor, tolerance of ambiguity should not be overlooked in the process of second language listening.The present study will adopt the method of quantitative and qualitative research. It aims at exploring the relationship between learners" tolerance of ambiguity and their use of listening strategies. The subjects are 102 junior students of English majors from Tianjin University of Science and Technology. Second Language Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale (Ely 2002) and the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (O’Malley et al.1990) are selected and modified to assess the level of tolerance of ambiguity and their listening strategy use respectively. Statistical analyses are conducted with SPSS Version 19.0 and Excel 2013 to explore the relationship between tolerance of ambiguity and listening comprehension. According to the scores of the two questionnaires,12 students are chosen for the semi-structured interview in order to supply supplementary data for the quantitative research. The research findings are as the following:1. In general, most of the subjects are at moderate level of TOA.2. There is no statistical significant correlation between the subjects’TOA and their employment of listening strategies. Even though the predictive power for the use of listening strategies of the TOA scale is limited, among the three categories of listening strategies, the cognitive strategy is the most frequently used.3. The limited correlation between the subjects’TOA and their employment of listening strategies comes from the weak consciousness of the use of listening strategies. Non-systematic use of listening strategies and the insufficiency of intensity and quality of the listening strategy are also influencing factors. The other factors that affect the use of listening strategies, which are categories into three general characters:the listeners, the listening materials and the listening process, are elicited from the semi-structured interview.Based on the above findings, some pedagogical suggestions for second language listening are put forward for the purpose of effective teaching of listening comprehension. And the study also activates more research in the field of TOA in second language learning.