A Study On The Correlation Between Senior High School Students’ Tolerance Of Ambiguity And Their Use Of English Learning Strategy

Tolerance of ambiguity was first put forward in the psychological field, and it received widely attention after it was introduced to the field of second language acquisition. A lot of difference in vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, pragmatic and so in exists. Because Chinese students have to learn English in the absence of English input, students often encounter uncertainty and ambiguity. Ambiguity exists in all language learning and it can decide learners’ percolation of language, how fast and well learners learn it and therefore influences the learning proficiency. Thus, language learners must have a certain degree of tolerance of ambiguity so that they can cope with the ambiguous situations in language learning and acquire new knowledge. In face with ambiguity, students’ choice and use of learning strategy will play an important role in learning outcome. Therefore, by investigating the general situation of students’tolerance of ambiguity and use of learning strategy and the relationship between students’tolerance of ambiguity and their use of learning strategy, the study is aimed at studying this teaching phenomenon and providing some practical suggestions.With senior one students as the participants of the research, the study is intended to find out the general situation of students’ tolerance of ambiguity and learning strategy use and also the relationship in between. To better understand the current situation of students’tolerance of ambiguity, the students are classified as high tolerance of ambiguity group and low tolerance of ambiguity group according to their levels of tolerance of ambiguity. Based on theoretical basis and statistical analyses the study wants to answer the following three questions:(1)What’s the general situation of senior one students’tolerance of ambiguity? Do male students and female students show differences in tolerance of ambiguity? If so, what is it?(2)Do students use learning strategies in English learning? What’s their favorite strategies? Do boys and girls use different strategies?(3)Is it the same between strategies used by students with high and low tolerance of ambiguity?(4)Is there a relationship between senior one students’ tolerance of ambiguity and strategy use? If any, what is it?To find out the answer, the author investigated 134 senior one students from Dawu No.l middle school. And two questionnaires were used in the research to find out the general situation of students’tolerance of ambiguity and learning strategy use and also the relationship in between. One is Ely’s (1995) Second Language Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale (SLTAS) and the other one is Oxford’s (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL). The research includes four parts:first descriptive analyses are used to get a whole understanding of senior one students’tolerance of ambiguity and learning strategy use. Descriptive analyses of tolerance of ambiguity in gender and learning strategies in gender are also got in this part. Second, a two-way division of students’tolerance of ambiguity is used to divide the students into high and low tolerance of ambiguity group. Strategies used by high and low tolerance of ambiguity group are discussed in this part. Third, independent samples T-test was used to get the difference between tolerance of ambiguity and gender, strategy use and gender and strategy use by high and low tolerance of ambiguity group. Last Pearson Correlation analyses are adopted to figure out the relationship between senior one students’tolerance of ambiguity and language learning strategy use. In this study SPSS 19.0 was used to analyze the quantitative data and the major finds are as follows:(1) Most of the participants have a moderate level of tolerance of ambiguity and there are no participants who have extremely high and low level of tolerance of ambiguity. Tolerance of ambiguity differences in gender is not statistically significant, although male students have a relatively low level of tolerance of ambiguity.(2) Senior one students have a relatively low frequency of using language learning strategies. Except affective strategy, the other five strategies are sometimes used by senior one students. The compensation strategy is most frequently used by all the participants, followed by memory, affective, metacognitive, cognitive and social strategy. Except for compensation strategy, female students seem to have a relatively higher strategies use compared with male students. But there is no significant difference between sex and strategy use.(3)As to the overall learning strategies, students with high tolerance of ambiguity tend to use strategies more frequently than students with low tolerance of ambiguity. And for each of the six strategies, students with high tolerance of ambiguity seem to use more strategies than those with low tolerance of ambiguity except the compensation strategy. The independent sample of T test doesn’t show any significant difference between tolerance of ambiguity and strategy use.(4) There is no significant correlation between tolerance of ambiguity and strategy use. But significant correlation is found almost among all of the six strategies with students of high tolerance of ambiguity. And for students with low tolerance of ambiguity, there is a significant correlation among all the strategies except memory strategy and compensation strategy. This indicates that high tolerance of ambiguity group students tend to use strategies more frequently and flexible while low tolerance of ambiguity group students tend to use them blindly.Based on the research results above, some practical suggestions are given to senior high school teachers to improve students’ tolerance of ambiguity. On one hand, teacher should raise students’ awareness of ambiguity; on the other hand teacher can employ various ways to improve students’ tolerance of ambiguity. Besides, teacher can foster students’ ability of tolerating ambiguity by way of strategy practice. Students are encouraged to use the learning strategies more often, boys in particular, to improve their effectiveness of English learning. Last, some limitations of the study are given.