A Study Of The Correlation Among Vocational College Students'TOA,Field Independence/Dependence And English Listening Proficiency

Listening is the precondition of communication as well as a basic way of acquiring knowledge, and the fact that some students are more successful at listening than others has led to investigations of the correlation between individual differences and students' English listening proficiency(ELP). Cognitive style, as a major variable leading to individual differences, has attracted researchers' great attention since the1950 s and its component parts have been studied respectively by scholars.Among all the studies, there are relatively few researches on the correlation between tolerance of ambiguity(TOA) and ELP, and although there are numerous studies on field independence/dependence in the field of SLA, the research results are quite different and even contradictory. Moreover, although TOA and field independence/dependence are both important cognitive styles, they are often studied separately and very few previous studies have explored the correlation between them.Additionally, how TOA and field independence/dependence affect students' ELP still remains unknown. Apart from these, when considering research subjects, there are few researches related to vocational college students. Therefore, the purposes of this study are to clarify the correlation among vocational college students' TOA, field independence/dependence and ELP, and to reveal the paths through which students' TOA and field independence/dependence influence their ELP.To achieve these purposes, 178 non-English major freshmen in Shandong Youth University of Political Science have been chosen as subjects in this study, and three instruments have been employed to collect data, namely, Second Language Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale(SLTAS) which is a questionnaire intending to test students' degrees of TOA, Cognitive Style Figures Test(CSFT) which aims to test students' degrees of field independence(FI), and English Listening Comprehension Test(ELCT)which is used to measure students' ELP. Then, Statistical Package for Social Sciences(SPSS) 17.0 is used to analyze the acquired data. The analysis methods adopted are Frequency Analysis, Pearson Correlation Analysis, Independent Samples T-test and Mediator Effect Test including both Simple Regression Analysisand Multiple Regression Analysis.The research results show that the scores of vocational college students' TOA, FI and English listening are all normally distributed. As to the correlation among students' TOA, FI and ELP, firstly, Students' TOA and ELP are positively and significantly correlated, and students' TOA has a positive influence on their ELP.Secondly, students' FI and their ELP are positively and significantly correlated, and students' FI has affected their ELP positively. Thirdly, Students' TOA and FI are significantly and positively correlated, and students' TOA and FI affect each other positively. Moreover, there are two paths through which students' TOA and FI influence their ELP: on the one hand, students' TOA directly influences their ELP and indirectly influences it through students' FI, on the other hand, students' FI directly influences their ELP and indirectly influences it through students' TOA.This study also puts forward some tentative recommendations for teachers and students to improve the teaching and learning of English listening based on the statistical results.