Effects Of Sex And Tolerance Of Ambiguity On EFL Reading Strategies

Reading is always a hoe for the teacher and students in the foreign languageteaching and learning. Nowadays, reading abilities are far below where students shouldbe and the differences between the middle school students are great. Lots of expertsand researchers have emphasized the reading ability. Many research results show thatlearners’ English learning achievements are related to their English learning strategies,and sex differences might have an important effect on English learning. Moreover,tolerance of ambiguity (TOA) may affect learners’ use of learning strategies. Therefore,this survey will investigate the effect of sex and TOA in students’ use of Englishreading strategies in the middle school.38junior middle school students in their third year, at Xue Dao Campus, inChengdu Seventh Middle School, participated in the survey. The data of the subjects’sex,tolerance of ambiguity, and their English reading strategies was thus collected. Theresult shows that sex and tolerance of ambiguity have an effect on the lexical strategiesand text comprehension strategies. With high TOA,females did significantly better thanmales in their use of the lexical processing strategies and males did better than femalesin the use of the text comprehension strategies；and for the same sex，those with highTOA did significantly better than those with low TOA．Therefore, it is necessary forteachers to pay more attention to the sex differences in the junior high school Englishteaching. Teachers should guide the male and female students’ use differently in readingstrategies. As for TOA, teachers should guide students to correctly deal with a new,uncertain linguistic phenomenon in order to improve the tolerance of ambiguity andaccurately use the reading strategies. Sex differences affect the use of reading strategies.There is a need in guiding and training male and female students in reading strategies.