A Correlation Study On Tolerance Of Ambiguity,English Listening Achievements And Listening Strategies Of Grade One Students In Senior High School

As we know,listening,as a receptive skill,is the basis of the four basic skills of English learning.Because of the differences in grammatical structure,pronunciation and intonation,cultural background and so on,various ambiguities exist during the English listening learning process of Chinese students.Limited by the traditional examination methods of our country,most middle school English teachers always focus on increasing students' skills of reading and writing,but neglect to cultivate their listening skills.Therefore,ambiguities bring about some extra difficulties for the beginners.Different learners' tolerance towards ambiguity is quite different.In order to make a further study towards the relation between tolerance of ambiguity and English learning,this paper chooses students' listening skills as the starting point,combines the researches of tolerance of ambiguity(TOA)and listening strategies from home and abroad,selects some grade one students of a high school in Sanming as experimental samples,and tries to find the correlation between their tolerance of ambiguity,listening achievements andlistening strategies.By our studies,we find the following results.First,the overall level of students' tolerance of ambiguity is low to middle.Analysis of the samples indicates that there are no obvious differences between genders.Besides,there is a significant positive correlation between students' tolerance of ambiguity and their listening achievements,the higher the tolerance of ambiguity is,the higher the listening achievements are.Second,in this paper,the author focuses on the following three categories of listening strategies:meta-cognitive strategy,cognitive strategy and social/affective strategy.The result of the test shows that students' overall usage of listening strategies is not optimistic.Comparing the three strategies;we can find that boys tend to choose social/affective strategy more while girls prefer the cognitive strategy during the listening process.Also,there is a significant positive correlation between students,TOA and their listening strategies.When students' tolerance of ambiguity is higher;the use of listening strategies is more frequent.Students' TOA correlates significantly with their meta-cognitive strategy,stronger than its correlation with cognitive strategy and its correlation with social/affective strategy is the most inconspicuous.This research has some practical significance.The experimental data proves that teachers should consider students' TOA' when they analyze students' listening performance and choose listening training strategies.Besides,teachers should develop students' TOA properly,instruct them how to use suitable listening strategies,so as to improve their listening scores.