A Study On Tolerance Of Ambiguity In Junior Middle School Students' Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary is one of the most crucial parts in language learning,and incidental vocabulary acquisition(IVA)is viewed as one of the ways that language learners obtain vocabulary.Moreover,IVA through extensive reading has been acknowledged as one of the good choices for the foreign/second language learners to enlarge their vocabulary.However,IVA is a complex process and may be affected by many factors.Meanwhile,as a crucial aspect of individual difference and is one component of learning style,tolerance of ambiguity(TOA),which was first defined by Frenkel-Brunswik(1948)as a personality variable that could predict one's behavioral features in ambiguous situations,is widely studied by many theorists in applied linguistics and foreign language teaching.Besides,numerous scholars asserted that it is fairly important to have a certain degree of TOA,and a great many of researches have been done concerning the relationship between TOA and specific aspects of language learning achievement.Nevertheless,studies on the examination of the relationship between TOA and IVA have been more or less ignored.This study is an attempt to explore the correlation between TOA and IVA.And it aims to answer three questions:(1)In which degree is junior middle school students' TOA?(2)Is there any correlation between the participants' TOA and their IVA?(3)What is the gender difference in the influence of TOA on IVA?The participants are 81(42 females and 39 males)Grade Eight junior middle school students from Hangzhou Jiangnan Experimental School.The Second Language Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale(SLTOAS)is adopted to measure the participants' level of TOA and three vocabulary knowledge tests(including one pretest and two post-tests)are employed to measure participants' vocabulary gain in course of the research.Four short stories from New Concept English 2 are chosen as the reading materials,from which ten words are selected as the target words,as a comparison,14 control words from senior school vocabulary list are also included in the pretest and two post tests to diminish the test effect and incidental exposures.The research procedure is divided into three phrases.In the first phase,the pretest about students' TOA and vocabulary knowledge is tested by using Second Language Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale and Vocabulary Knowledge Scale respectively.Subsequently the reading materials are determined,and target words as well as control words are chosen by top five Grade Eight students in Jiangnan Experimental School;the second phase is the reading treatment and immediate test about the target words and control words;the third phase is the post test about the target words and control words.In this study,a five-week experiment is conducted,and all the statistics are analyzed by SPSS 16.0,by means of descriptive analysis,paired tests and the correlation analysis,the results go as follow:(1)Most of junior middle school students' TOA are at an intermediate level and different students have different TOA.In fact,there exists difference between males and females in terms of TOA.Males TOA scores are lower than those of females in terms of the gender,males are more tolerant than females in junior middle schools.(2)Learners can acquire some vocabulary knowledge incidentally through reading.Besides,there is a positive correlation between TOA and the immediate post test of IVA(incidental vocabulary acquisition),which means that learners who are more tolerant can gain more vocabulary through reading.What's more,learners who are more tolerant can retain more vocabulary in the context of reading treatment.(3)There is a gender difference in the correlation between TOA and participants' IVA performance.Both males and female group have positive correlations,and the coefficient for the male group is higher than that of the female group.The findings have both theoretical and pedagogical implications in the field of second/foreign acquisition.First,the present study provides informative data by revealing the correlation between TOA and the outcome of IVA through reading.Secondly,the awareness of individual differences in TOA is beneficial to both teachers and learners to have a better understanding of the relationship between TOA and IVA,and to improve the outcome of language teaching.To sum up,IVA through reading is one of the good ways to increase students' vocabulary knowledge,teachers and students should pay attention to it.In the end of the paper,the limitations and some suggestions are also presented.