A Study On Middle School Students' Ambiguity Tolerance And Its Influence On Their English Performance

This paper aims to investigate the ambiguity tolerance differences between different language knowledge and skills among learners in the process of English learning,and whether the differences of ambiguity tolerance in high,medium and low degree have an impact on test results.To provide a clearer approach for junior high school English learners and teachers to treat the relation between ambiguity tolerance and English learning effectiveness.The main research methods of this article are:Survey method,literature research method,quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis.The measurement tool adopted in this study are: Norton's(1975)Ambiguity Tolerance questionnaire(MAT-50),which contains a 7-level likert scale with 61 survey items;and Liu Yang's(2007)second language ambiguity tolerance scale adapted based on Ely(2002),which contains 16 items and measures the ambiguity tolerance of items such as pronunciation,speaking,listening,reading comprehension,vocabulary and grammar.The data collected by measuring tools are the independent variables of this study.The dependent variables of this study were the total scores and individual scores of the final examination in the first school year of grade two.The participants of this survey are 160 students randomly selected from the seventh grade of a middle school in Chongqing.A total of 160 questionnaires were distributed,among which 141 were valid.The average age of the students is 14 years old,including 66 boys(47%)and 75girls(53%).The conclusions are ambiguity tolerance is a stable individual trait,so,we can predict the ambiguity tolerance under different environments according to the general scale and the ambiguity tolerance of different language knowledge or language skills according to the second language ambiguity tolerance.The output ambiguity tolerance is lower than the input ambiguity tolerance,and there are significant differences between the two.There are significant differences in ambiguity tolerance between some language knowledge or language skills.Ambiguity tolerance has a significant effect on the overall performance of foreign language learning,and theeffect varies with task types.