The Mediating Effect Of Foreign Language Reading Anxiety In The Relationship Between Tolerance Of Ambiguity And English Reading Achievement

The present study mainly probes into the mediating effect of foreign language(FL)reading anxiety in the effect of tolerance of ambiguity(TOA)on English reading in Chinese high school students.To the Chinese students,English reading is a cognitive process filled with various ambiguities.Chinese and English belong to two different language systems.There exist differences in vocabulary,grammar,syntax and so on.Therefore,language learners will confront certain language ambiguities that they are unfamiliar with or indefinite.The intolerant learners will produce anxiety,obsession or fear,which may negatively influence their language input.Meanwhile,some studies argue that a highly uncertain state of language learners will cause an increase of their anxiety levels and the affective filter.The cognitive ability of the students will be greatly influenced,which will decrease their language input.Those arguments theoretically suggest that anxiety plays a mediating role between TOA and foreign language learning.Seeing that the research in this area is relatively rare until recently,it is necessary for the researcher to do the present study.Actually,there are many affective variables influencing language learning.The present study focuses on TOA and FL reading anxiety because the two variables are theoretically interrelated to each other and have significant influence on learners' language learning.In addition,this study is limited to English reading because it makes a great difference in the process of language teaching and learning.Therefore,the research questions of the present study are as follows:1.Does foreign language reading anxiety differ in terms of tolerance of ambiguity in English reading?2.Does students' English reading achievement differ in terms of tolerance of ambiguity?3.Does foreign language reading anxiety mediate between tolerance of ambiguity and English reading achievement?To explore the above three research questions,a quantitative research is carried out in the NO.14 High School which is one of the key high schools in Hengshui.280 students are chosen randomly as the research subjects.Ely's Second Language Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale(abbreviated as SLTAS)and Saito's Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale(abbreviated as FLRAS)are adopted in the research.The data are collected from two questionnaires and a reading comprehension test to explore students' TOA,FL reading anxiety and English reading achievement.The data collected in the present study are processed by SPSS 13.0(Statistical Package for Social Science 13.0),and a statistical analysis is made with the data.The first two research questions are analyzed by One-way ANOVA,and the last research question by Multiple Regression.The results are presented as follows:1.The FL reading anxiety of the students who are on the high TOA level is significantly lower than the students on the moderate level and low level;the FL reading anxiety of the students who are on the moderate level are also significantly lower than those who are on the low level.2.The students who are in the high TOA group will get better reading achievement than those in the moderate group and low group.The students who are in the moderate tolerance group will get slightly higher grades than those in the low group.3.Based on the results of multiple regression,FL reading anxiety plays a significant mediating role in the effect of TOA on English reading.After presenting the statistical results and analyses,the researcher makes a tentative discussion on the final results.It turns out that the significant difference of students' FL reading anxiety as well as their English reading achievement may be caused by the difference between English and Chinese language as well as their different TOA levels.Moreover,a highly uncertain state of the language learners will cause an increase of their anxiety levels and the affective filter.Therefore,the cognitive ability of the students will be greatly influenced,which will decrease their language input,and affect their language learning achievement.The findings of the research prove the previous hypotheses,and the present study is of both theoretical and practical significance.Besides,according to the results of the present study and the author's practical teaching experience,some implications and suggestions are proposed for the teaching and learning of English reading in high schools,which aims at providing some useful ideas of the relevant issues for teachers and students,and improve the teaching and learning of English reading.