A Study On Correlation Between Tolerance Of Ambiguity And Senior High School Students' English Writing Strategies

As one of the four basic skills of listening,speaking,reading and writing,English writing is an important part of the high school English learning process.At the same time,writing as an output skill in language learning can effectively test students' English proficiency.A large number of studies have shown that appropriate use of writing strategies is beneficial to improve students' writing proficiency.As an internal factor,tolerance of ambiguity influences many aspects in English learning.Students with different level of tolerance of ambiguity have shown differences in using writing strategies.Therefore,it is of great help for students and teachers to study the relationship between tolerance of ambiguity and writing strategies.This research aims to explore the correlation between English writing tolerance of ambiguity and English writing strategies,and to find out the differences among writing strategies employed by the students with different levels of tolerance of ambiguity.Therefore,this study selects 156 Grade Two students from Huaihai Senior School in Huaian City,Jiangsu Province as research subjects,and uses two questionnaires as research tools: one is English writing tolerance of ambiguity questionnaire based on Ely's(1995)Second Language Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale and the other is English writing strategy questionnaire.The study also collects the students' writing scores in monthly and mid-term exam,and then employs SPSS20 to conduct descriptive analysis,frequency analysis,Test for homogeneity of variance,one-way analysis of variance(ANOVA),multiple comparison test and Pearson correlation analysis.The research reveals that: firstly,the results show that students with moderate level of tolerance of ambiguity account for the major part of the whole number,while the number of students with high and low level of tolerance of ambiguity is small.Secondly,there is no significant correlation between tolerance of ambiguity and writing proficiency,but from descriptive statistics,it can be concluded that students with moderate level of tolerance of ambiguity get slightly higher than the other two groups.Thirdly,as for the use of writing strategies,students usually use compensation strategies in the writing process,and often use metacognitive and cognitive strategies,and socio-affective strategies are seldom used,which is based on the Standards of Oxford's(1990)learning strategy scores.Fourthly,writing strategies are correlated with writing proficiency.Metacognitive,compensation and socio-affective strategies are positively related with writing proficiency.Fifthly,the correlation between tolerance of ambiguity and writing strategies does exist.Tolerance of ambiguity is positively related with meta-cognitive strategies,but negatively correlated with compensation and socio-affective strategies.Sixthly,there are some differences in using writing strategies among students with different levels of tolerance of ambiguity.Students with high levels of tolerance of ambiguity use more metacognitive strategies,but students with low level of tolerance of ambiguity rarely use it and they tend to use the other three writing strategies,students in moderate level of tolerance of ambiguity are more inclined to use compensation and socio-affective strategies.Based on the findings,four pieces of suggestions can be put forward as follows:(1)Cultivating students' awareness and habit of asking questions,cooperation and self-motivation.(2)Strengthening the development of meta-cognitive,compensation and socio-affective strategies to improve students' writing proficiency.(3)Teaching students to know and use cognitive strategies correctly.(4)Helping students with high level of tolerance of ambiguity practice compensation and socio-affective strategies,and helping those with low level of tolerance of ambiguity learn to use meta-cognitive strategies.In conclusion,in teaching process teachers should help students to know and achieve a reasonable level of tolerance of ambiguity and use writing strategies appropriately so as to improve the students' English writing proficiency.