A Study Of The Correlation Between Tolerance Of Ambiguity And English Reading Ability

Reading is seen as one of the most important ways to obtain information and knowledge. Many factors are believed to influence individual’s reading ability.Among them, tolerance of ambiguity is a significant factor which is often neglected by most English teachers.Tolerance of ambiguity is a kind of learning style related to bold guessing. It has caught most researchers’ eyes in foreign countries as early as in the 1950 s. Though there are a few researches concerned with tolerance of ambiguity in the field of second language acquisition, researches about the correlation between tolerance of ambiguity and English reading ability are few. Moreover, the researches involved in English reading are mainly about college students while the research on the non-English-major graduate students’ tolerance of ambiguity is quiet few. Therefore,the present study is intended to investigate the correlation between the non-English-major graduate students’ tolerance of ambiguity and their English reading ability. And the correlation between the non-English-major graduate students’ tolerance of ambiguity and their English reading ability in reading different text types.On the basis of the study, the author makes great attempts to provide implications for future English teaching so as to improve the non-English-major graduate students’ English reading ability.There are 71 non-English-major graduate students employed in the present study who are from Shandong Normal University. The participants’ tolerance of ambiguity is assessed by Second Language Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale designed by Ely(2002). Then an English reading comprehension test which consists of six passages selected from PETS-3 is employed to assess the participants’ English reading ability.At last, the present study employs SPSS 17.0 to analyze the data. By analyzing the data collected in the present study, results and major findings present that:1. The non-English-major graduate students’ tolerance of ambiguity is in a lower-middle level. And the non-English-major graduate students’ scores of tolerance of ambiguity has a significant negative correlation with their English reading ability.The lower scores of tolerance of ambiguity are, the higher level of tolerance of ambiguity is. Therefore, compared with those with lower level of tolerance of ambiguity,students with higher level of tolerance of ambiguity tend to perform better in reading comprehension.2. There is a negative correlation between the non-English-major graduate students’ tolerance of ambiguity and their English reading ability in reading different text types. The correlation between students’ tolerance of ambiguity and their narration and argumentation scores has a stronger correlation than the correlation between the students’ tolerance of ambiguity and their exposition scores.Based on the major findings of the present study, the author proposes some suggestions to improve students’ English reading ability. Finally, limitations of the present study are presented and directions for future research in this area are highlighted.