| As one of the most frequently used forms of language skills. English listening comprehension has been playing an important role in daily communication and English education. However, the students’listening comprehension is poor since the listening teaching in China started relatively late and the government and teachers were not paying enough attention to listening teaching, which makes listening comprehension a big problem for junior middle school students’English learning.As we all know, in English learning process, unfamiliar grammar structure. pronunciation, sentence patterns, the habit of oral expression and strange way of thinking, behavior, intrinsic values, all of these might become ambiguous factors influencing listening comprehension. At the same time, English listening comprehension is a process with a lot of ambiguities. Compared with the other three English learning skills (speaking, reading and writing), listening is difficult because of its uncertain factors:learners just can listen to the sound, without seeing the words, which requires the students to listen with high degree of concentration. The uncertain factors make the listening comprehension more difficult, and it is easy to make the students anxious and cause the students’boredom. Different learners have different perspectives on these fuzzy language phenomena. Their understanding, dealing process and tolerance of these phenomena are different, which is related to their tolerance of ambiguity. Hence, tolerance of ambiguity, which can be considered as one of the learning styles, also plays an important role in English learning process. Different English learners have different "Tolerance of Ambiguity". Researchers at home and abroad abroad have studied the relationship between tolerance of ambiguity and language learning or reading. However, little research has been done into the relationship between tolerance of ambiguity and English listening. Therefore, this thesis will discuss the relationship between tolerance of ambiguity and listening comprehension in junior middle school students.This thesis attempts to answer the following questions:(1) What is the situation of junior middle school students’tolerance of ambiguity and listening comprehension? What are the differences between male and female learners?(2) What is the relationship between tolerance of ambiguity and listening comprehension in junior middle school?(3) What are the differences among the learners at different levels of tolerance of ambiguity when they are selecting listening strategies?95 students in junior Grade Three from Hebei province were chosen to join in this research, including 51 females and 44 males. The author used questionnaire and interview to finish the investigation. The test of junior middle school students’listening ability is the listening comprehension section of Senior High School Entrance Examination of Hebei province (2015). By the data analysis with SPSS, it shows that no matter male or female learners, all of the students have tolerance of ambiguity. There is no significant difference between male and female learners. However, female learners’listening comprehension is better than male learners’. By the correlative analysis with Pearson in SPSS, the result shows that the correlation between listening comprehension and the tolerance of ambiguity is significant, and they are positively related with each other, no matter male or female junior middle school learners. What’s more, all the junior middle school learners often use strategies in listening process consciously. They are good at using the meta-cognitive strategies, followed by the cognitive strategies, and the least used strategies are the affective and social strategies. But different students with higher, moderate and lower tolerance of ambiguity focus on different listening strategies. The higher Tolerance of Ambiguity learners use self-planning strategy, self-management strategies, inferring strategy and transformation strategy more often than lower and moderate Tolerance of Ambiguity learners. But lower Tolerance of Ambiguity learners use self-monitoring strategy and affective strategy more often than higher and moderate Tolerance of Ambiguity learners. The results indicate that the learners with moderate tolerance of ambiguity select listening strategies more flexible. In some degree, the moderate tolerance of ambiguity is the most appropriate and preferred for optimum states in English language learning. |
