A Correlation Study On Senior High School Students' Tolerance Of AmbiguityEnglish Writing Strategies And Writing Achievements

With the further development of second language acquisition,the research focus has transferred from the exploration of effective teaching methods to the investigation of learners' individual differences in the learning process.Among all the individual differences,tolerances of ambiguity is regarded as a personal cognitive style as well as personality trait which has arouse many scholars attention at home and abroad.However,rare researches are conducted to explore the correlation on tolerance of ambiguity,writing strategies and writing achievement,especially in senior high schools.Besides,most students hold the opinion that it is hard to express their views in the process of writing,causing the overall writing achievement lower than the other parts of English study.Therefore,this study attempts to find the correlation between these variables,aiming to explore effective methods to improve students' English writing achievements.This thesis attempts to answer questions as follows:(1)Does the correlation between tolerance of ambiguity and writing achievement exist?(2)Does the correlation between writing strategies and writing achievement exist?(3)Is there any relationship between senior high school students' tolerance of ambiguity and their English writing strategies? If yes,what are the differences in using writing strategies among students with different levels of tolerances of ambiguity?The participants involved in the study are 212 students from Pingyuan No.1 Senior High School in Shandong Province.And all of them are in Grade 2.This study adopts quantitative approaches,and uses two questionnaires as research tools: one is based on Ely's(1995)Second Language Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale and the other is Oxford's English Writing Strategy Scale.Meanwhile,the author also collects the participants' writing scores of two exams.Then employing SPSS 23.0analyzes the collected data.The research findings are listed below:(1)In general,it's a negative correlation between students' tolerance of ambiguity and their writing achievements but the correlation between them is not obvious.Therefore,with the further research through descriptive analysis,it finds students' with moderate level tolerance of ambiguity are slightly better in the English writing than high tolerance group students but are apparently higher than low tolerance group's students.(2)As for the use of writing strategies,students tend to use cognitive strategies,meta-cognitive strategies and compensation strategies,especially the compensation strategies.Conversely,socialaffective strategies are seldom used.And about the correlation betweenwriting strategies and writing achievement,it shows meta-cognitive,compensation and social-affective strategies are positively related with writing achievement,but the correlation between cognitive strategies and writing achievement is not obvious.(3)In terms of the correlation between students' tolerance of ambiguity and their application of writing strategies,it shows the using frequency of various writing strategies among low tolerance students is obviously higher than the other groups.Students with high tolerance of ambiguity tend to use meta-cognitive and compensation strategies while students in the moderate level group are likely to use compensation and social-affective strategies.Finally,the author puts forward some practical suggestions that may promote senior high school students' writing achievements according to the results of the research.Then the limitations of the study are pointed out and further suggestions are given for further researches.