A Study On The Correlation Between Tolerance Of Ambiguity And Reading Comprehension In Senior High School

Reading comprehension has been under the spotlight for a long time because of the proportion it takes up in the college entrance examination. In order to improve the students’ ability of reading comprehension, English teachers devote much energy to it in the daily teaching. However, what confused us is why same teaching patterns often lead to different learning results, which attracted the scholar’s attention to the students’ cognitive style. Tolerance of ambiguity(TOA), an important factor which has an effect on cognition, aroused numerous scholars’ interest. And the relationship between TOA and English reading comprehension has also become a research hot spot.The present study was based on the theories of TOA from some scholars abroad and at home. 205 students in Grade Two of a senior high school in Nankang, Ganzhou,Jiangxi were chosen as the participants. Ely’s Second Language Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale(SLTAS) was adopted to test the participants’ TOA and a specially designed reading comprehension test was used to examine the participants’ level of reading comprehension.Statistical analyses and description of the data were conducted with SPSS(Statistical Package for Social Science), Version 17.0. The study explored the current situation of the high school students’ TOA in Nankang, the relationship between the participants’ TOA and their reading comprehension scores, and whether TOA was different in different dimensions, such as listening, speaking, reading and so on. What’s more, it also tried to investigate whether the differences of question difficulty and gender would affect the relationship between the participants’ TOA and their reading comprehension scores.According to the study, the findings are as following:1. During the English learning, the whole level of the high school students’ TOA was middle, but most of the students had a relatively low TOA.2. High school students’ TOA in five dimensions was different from each other. The arrangement from high to low was speaking, listening, grammar, reading and writing.3. There was significant and positive correlation between the participants’ TOA and their reading comprehension scores.4. Difficulty-related difference did make some contributions to the correlation between the participants’ TOA and their reading comprehension scores. But it did not mean the more difficult the questions were, the greater the correlation coefficient was. It was complicated.5. In the present study, gender had no effect on the correlation between the participants’ TOA and their reading comprehension scores.Based on the above findings, a few suggestions have been put forward to English teachers on how to organize reading teaching in the senior high school.