A Study On The Correlation Between The Tolerance Of Ambiguity And Students' English Achievements In Grade 7

As for many Chinese learners who learn English as a foreign language,they may inevitably encounter with some uncertainties because of the differences from vocabulary,grammar even culture.So tolerance of ambiguity is needed during the process of learning English.Many researches have done by the linguists in this field.Unfortunately,most of these studies took university and senior high school students as subjects,and there are a few studies on this for the junior high students.Therefore,this study takes the junior high school students as subjects and tries to analyze the relationship between tolerance of ambiguity and English achievements by using questionnaires.The following three questions are designed in this study.(1)Are the tolerance of ambiguity levels of the junior high school students much higher compared with the senior high school students?(2)Is there any correlation between tolerance of ambiguity and the overall English achievements? If there is,what is it?(3)Are there any correlations between tolerance of ambiguity and their English listening,reading and writing achievements of the junior high school students? If there are,what are they?In order to answer those questions mentioned above,a questionnaire survey was carried out among 282 junior high school students and 234 senior high school students in the Foreign Language School in Wanzhou,Chongqing.In the meanwhile,the English achievement scores of the 282 junior high school students were collected.Based on these data,descriptive statistics,Independent T-test and the Correlation analyze are employed.The study reveals the following findings.Firstly,the tolerance of ambiguity levels of the senior high school students are much higher.Secondly,the correlation between the tolerance of ambiguity and the overall English achievements of the junior high school students is not significant.Thirdly,for the junior high school students,there are significant correlations between tolerance of ambiguity and their English listening and reading achievements,while there is nearly no correlation between the tolerance of ambiguity and their English writing achievements.At the end of this study,the results are analyzed and discussed.And the significance and implications of this present study are proposed from the aspects of both teachers and learners.It is much beneficial for both teachers and learners to improve learners' English achievements.English teachers should realize and respect the differences of the tolerance of ambiguity of their students clearly during the process of teaching and students must know their tolerance of ambiguity and make use of it scientifically during their learning process.