A Study On The Correlation Between Junior Middle School Students' Tolerance Of Ambiguity And Their English Achievement

Since Frankel-Brunsville,a distinguished American psychologist,came up with the concept of tolerance of ambiguity(TOA)in 1949,a variety of scholars found that there was a certain relationship between TOA and language proficiency and the level of TOA has direct influence on students' language performance.In the thesis,the author first used Ely's Second Language Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale(SLTAS)and chose the students of Middle School Attached to Guangxi University to conduct the questionnaire survey and interview from four dimensions,namely,listening,speaking,reading and writing.Then the third mock paper in 2016 was used to test the subjects' English performance in order to explore the following four questions:(1)What is the general situation of TOA of junior middle school students in the process of learning English?(2)What is the correlation between TOA and students' English achievement?(3)What are the differences of English achievement among the students with different levels of TOA?(4)What are the differences of male and female students in the level of TOA in English learning?The results indicated that,(1)The level of TOA of junior middle school students is placed in the middle,which means that students can put up with the ambiguous,unfamiliar and complex situation;(2)TOA is positively related to students' English performance,which means that the higher level of TOA the students possess,the better English performance they will have;(3)There are significant differences among different levels of TOA in students' English achievement.The differences are significant in high TOA level group and low TOA level group,and in high TOA level group and middle TOA level group.While there is no significant difference between middle TOA level group and low TOA level group;(4)Male and female students have differences in overall TOA.The overall TOA of males are higher than that of females,but the TOA of females are significantly higher than that of males in listening and writing.Based on the results,the author gives following teaching suggestions:(1)Teaching flexibly and cultivating students' tolerance of ambiguity consciously;(2)Arranging the teaching contents and processing designedly and helping students to learn effectively based on their TOA in different dimensions;(3)Encouraging students to guess boldly based on the contexts and improve their reaction capability when they face the unfamiliar words and difficult grammatical structures and other ambiguous situations;(4)Guiding students to learn foreign language and accept the language culture actively;(5)Guiding the students to improve their communicative competence and master certain communicative strategies.(6)Playing the respective advantages of male and female learners.