A Study Of The Relationship Between High School Students’ Tolerance Of Ambiguity And Metacognitive Strategy Use In EFL Reading

Tolerance of ambiguity, a kind of learning style or personality variable, has been confirmed to berelated closely to the second language learning, for example, it can influence the choice of languagelearning strategies (Ehrman＆Oxford,1990). Metacognitive strategies are the deliberate, consciousprocedures used by readers to improve text comprehension in foreign language reading (Maasum＆Maarof,2012).The present study attempts to investigate the relationship between tolerance of ambiguity andmetacognitive strategies in English reading comprehension and their influences on high school students‘reading abilities. Specifically, the study aims to find whether the differences exist in metacognitive strategyuse and English reading performance among students with high, middle and low ambiguity tolerancedegrees. Questionnaires and participant interviews are involved in the research methodology.130studentsin Grade two of Yongdeng No.1senior high school completed the TOA and MER questionnaires.Follow-up interviews were then conducted with the28participants.Findings from the study revealed that the degree of ambiguity tolerance positively influence students‘choice of learning strategies but TOA has slightly effect on English reading performance. Moreover,metacognitive strategy use has impact on students‘reading scores in English reading test to some extent.Among four categories of metacognitive strategies, evaluating strategy was least frequently used by highschool students but the usage of it exhibits certain predictive validity in explaining the differences in thestudents‘English reading results.The results of the present study contributes to an understanding of the differences in metacognitivestrategy use by high school students with high, middle and low ambiguity tolerance levels in their readingactivities, practical suggestions for pedagogy and future research were also identified.