A Study On The Correlation Between English Majors' Tolerance Of Ambiguity And Their Writing Strategies And Performance

In recent decades,the influence of tolerance of ambiguity(TOA)on English writing has attracted much attention.TOA is regarded as an important part of students' English writing,whose importance has been widely emphasized by researchers in the field of second language acquisition.English writing strategy is another major variable which restricts students' English writing performance,and its position in teaching of English writing has become a major research topic that attracts broad attention from scholars both at home and abroad.This thesis is guided by the theoretical framework of recent researches and tries to find out the relationship between writing TOA and writing strategies,and the relationship between writing TOA and writing performance.The research questions in the study are: What is the current situation of English majors' writing TOA? What is the relationship between English majors' writing TOA and their English writing strategies? What is the relationship between English majors' writing TOA and their English writing performance?In order to answer the research questions,115 second-year English majors in four classes from a foreign language university were chosen as participants.Two questionnaires,a writing test paper and the Statistical Package for Social Science 21.0(SPSS 21.0)were adopted as research instruments to collect and analyze data in detail.Research findings are as follows:Firstly,115 students who participated in this study were assigned into three groups,including the groups of low,medium and high writing TOA.Results showed that the extremely low and high levels of writing TOA were in a small portion,and for most of the students,their writing TOA was at the medium level.Secondly,from one-way ANOVA,multiple comparison test and Pearson correlation analysis,it can be concluded that there was a correlation between writing TOA and the use of English writing strategies,and students with different writing TOA had significant differences in the use of English writing strategies.The data has shown that students with high writing TOA mostly used metacognitive strategy,and those with medium writing TOA used compensation strategy and social-affective strategy more frequently,while students with writing TOA usually used cognitive strategy,compensation strategy and social-affective strategies.Thirdly,it was found that there was no significant correlation between students' writing TOA and their writing performance.Though no significant correlation was found,the differences in the degrees of learners' writing TOA surely influenced learners' writing performances.Students with medium writing TOA had higher writing scores than those with extremely high writing TOA or extremely low writing TOA.