An Empirical Study Of The Correlation Between Listening Anxiety,Tolerance Of Ambiguity And Listening Scores Of High School Students

As two important affective factors in second language acquisition,anxiety and Tolerance of Ambiguity(TOA)have attracted increasing attention from researchers both at home and abroad.Many researchers have conducted numerous studies on language anxiety and TOA from different aspects and their studies have shown that language anxiety is one of the key factors affecting learners' L2 learning and successful language learners need proper TOA.However,most of the previous studies only focus on the relationship between anxiety/TOA and overall English study alone and the research scope has hardly been extended to the language-skill-specific anxieties or TOA,especially the study of combined impacts of anxieties and TOA on listening.It is widely acknowledged that English listening is a highly sophisticated intelligence activity,which requires the learners to process large amounts of complicated information from which the target information need to be distinguished and identified.During this process,chances are that learners' anxieties and ambiguities are easily provoked due to incomplete comprehension of the information they've received.The deepening English educational reform in China has somewhat thwarted the traditional English teaching mode centering around grammar and has pinpointed the increasing importance of listening,thus stressing the urgency to reverse the situation of the long-time weakened role of English listening.Besides,previous researches only take college students as subjects.Against this background,the author tries to conduct an empirical study of listening anxiety and TOA of the Chinese high school students to find out the combined impacts of anxiety and TOA on students' listening comprehension achievement,thus offering some guidance for the teaching of L2 English listening.This study is designed to investigate how learners' internal factors:listening anxiety and TOA,influence their listening comprehension achievement by an experiment conducted on Grade One students of a high school in Fuzhou as the subjects.The following three questions are to be discussed:(1)Are listening anxiety and TOA related to listening scores and is listening anxiety related to TOA?(2)Is there any difference between high-level listening score group and low-level listening score group in listening anxiety and TOA and is there any difference between boys and girls in listening anxiety and TOA?(3)To what degree can listening anxiety and TO A predict the variance of the listening comprehension achievement?All the collected data are analyzed with SPSS 19.0 and the main findings are as follows:1)There is a significant positive relationship between TOA and listening score and a highly significant negative correlation between listening anxiety and listening score with a higher correlation coefficient while the listening anxiety demonstrates a negative correlation with TOA.2)The high-level listening score group and low-level listening score group differ remarkably in listening anxiety and TOA with the former having lower anxiety level and higher TOA level than the latter group.The difference between boys and girls in listening anxiety is significant,but there is no discrepancy in their TOA levels.3)Listening anxiety and TOA can respectively predict and explain the variance of listening comprehension achievement,but when combining the two to carry out the multiple regression analysis,the author finds that listening anxiety can predict much more than TOA.By analyzing the combined impacts of listening anxiety and TOA on listening comprehension achievement,the present study further demonstrates the prevalent existence of EFL listening anxiety and the notably positive correlation between TOA and listening comprehension achievement.The study aims to raise teachers' awareness of the great significance of learners' emotional factors and offer some suggestions for the teaching of listening from this perspective in order to comprehensively improve students'listening ability.Therefore,the research boasts some theoretical and practical implications.