A Correlative Study On The Tolerance Of Ambiguity And English Reading Strategy Use

Foreign language learning is a complex process, which involves a lot of language and cultural differences.Inthe learning process, learners meet ambiguous situations inevitably. This new, ambiguous, and complexlinguistic situation which learners encountered would produce a kind of psychological distance between themother tongue and target language,which in turn leads to a high degree of uncertainty in foreign languagelearning for learners. Learners should know how to adopt appropriate strategies to solve different problemsduring the reading process, because appropriate learning strategy use can provide effective help for learners.In the process of foreign language learning, there are many factors can influence learners’ choice oflearning strategies, such as personality, motivation, gender, age, intelligence, and learning style. As a kind ofcognitive style, tolerance of ambiguity, also plays a decisive role in English learning. Researchers from abroadand home have conducted researches about the relationship between ambiguity and language learning. When itcomes to the relationship between ambiguity tolerance and language learning strategies, however, the relatedresearch still limited. Therefore, according to this problem, this study will discuss the relationship betweentolerance of ambiguity and reading strategy use.This study aims to answer the following questions:1. What are the levels of non-English majors’ ambiguity tolerance?2. What strategies do learners use, and how do they use reading strategies?3. What are the relationships between ambiguity tolerance and English reading strategies?Questionnaires about tolerance of ambiguity and English reading strategies are carried out respectively on68students from two parallel classes of Longdong University. According to the results of questionnaire ofambiguity tolerance, all the learners are divided into three groups, namely, high, moderate and low. Through theanalysis of comparative study presents that learners with different degree of tolerance inclined to adoptdifferent reading strategies, by means of SPSS16.0software, the author analyzed the data and made interviewson subjects from different ambiguity tolerance groups. The study showed that learners’ ambiguity tolerance havecorrelation with their reading strategies use, and metacognitive, cognitive and social/affective strategies arepositively correlated with learners’ ambiguity tolerance. The learners with high ambiguity tolerance do well thanlearners from the other two groups, they use reading strategies more frequently than the other two groups.Thereare significant difference appearing in employing some individual reading strategies between the high and lowtolerance group. When the learners with high tolerance of ambiguity meet ambiguous situations, they would like to choose the strategies of contextualization, self-encouragement and communicating with others morefrequently than the other two groups of learners. Meanwhile, the study indicated that the significant differencesamong the three groups also existed in using social/affective strategies.The implications and suggestions were also presented at the end of the paper on the basis of the study, and itis hoped that this will contribute to further research in the relationship between tolerance of ambiguity andlearning strategies use.