A Correlative Study On Tolerance Of Ambiguity, English Reading Anxiety And Reading Achievement Of The Senior High School Students

For Chinese students, English learning is a very complicated process. As one of the affective factors and one of the cognitive factors, tolerance of ambiguity(TOA) and English reading anxiety(ERA) are often regarded as two significant factors affecting English learning achievement. Recently, despite a number of independent studies have been made on anxiety and tolerance of ambiguity respectively from different perspectives in the past, few researchers have taken into account the effects of the two factors on English learning at the same time. The present study focuses on the correlation analysis of tolerance of ambiguity, senior high school students’ English reading anxiety and reading achievement. The participants selected for this research were 93 senior high school students. All the data were collected by the questionnaires revised from the Second Language Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale (Ely,1995), Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (Saito,1999). With the help of SPSS 13.0, we conducted and analyzed the data about students’ TOA and reading anxiety.The study reaches the following conclusions:1) generally speaking, the subjects of senior high school students have a low level of TOA and high level of ERA in the process of English reading; 2)different level of TOA and ERA have a significant difference in foreign language reading comprehension achievement. In other words, the students with higher level of TOA have higher reading comprehension achievements than the lower level students. However, the students with higher level of ERA have lower reading comprehension achievements than the higher level students; 3)through Pearson Correlation analysis, it is verified that a significant negative correlation indeed exists between reading anxiety and TOA. That is to say, the higher TOA is helpful to reduce the foreign language reading anxiety. It is shown that a significant positive correlation exists between TOA and reading achievement, a significant negative correlation exists between ERA and reading achievement. In other words, the higher the TOA, the higher ERA. Students with higher ERA tend to perform poor reading achievement.