A Study On The Correlation Between Senior High School Students' Tolerance Of Ambiguity And Their Use Of English Listening Strategies

Among five basic language skills required in English Curriculum Standard for Senior High School(2017),listening,as a comprehensive skill,plays an important role in the course of language comprehension.Meanwhile,as a dynamic and complex process,listening contains a lot of ambiguous situations,which may obstruct learners' understanding about listening materials.It is proved that both tolerance of ambiguity and listening strategies are beneficial to the improvement of listening proficiency;however,limited studies have been done to explore the relationship between these two variables.Therefore,the author attempts to investigate senior high school students' tolerance of ambiguity and their listening strategies use,and try to explore the correlation between students' tolerance of ambiguity and their use of listening strategies,hoping to offer feasible suggestions for English listening teaching.The present research is a quantitative study and two questionnaires are adopted as research instruments: one is Second Language Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale and the other is Questionnaire of Senior High School Students' English Listening Strategies.The participants in this study are 310 senior high school students of Grade two in Tianjin No.21 High School.After analyzing data by SPSS,the research findings are concluded as follows:1.Senior high school students' tolerance of ambiguity in general is under the medium level.2.Senior high school students have a relatively high frequency in listening strategies use.However,among three aspects of listening strategies,students' using frequency of social/affective and metacognitive strategies is obviously lower than that of cognitive strategies.Besides,students with high tolerance of ambiguity use listening strategies more frequently and proficiently than students with low tolerance of ambiguity.3.There is positive and significant correlation between senior high school students' tolerance of ambiguity and their use of listening strategies,and the correlation between students' tolerance of ambiguity and their use of cognitive strategies is the strongest,followed by metacognitive strategies,and the correlation between students' tolerance of ambiguity and their use of social/affective strategies is the weakest.Based on the findings mentioned above,the author recommends several useful implications for English teaching: first,senior high school English teachers should raise the awareness of developing students' tolerance of ambiguity and let students realize the importance of tolerance of ambiguity;then,teachers should take actions,such as explaining background knowledge,boosting students' using frequency of cognitive strategies,etc.,to help students improve their tolerance of ambiguity;third,they ought to attach importance to listening strategies instruction;fourth,it is especially necessary for English teachers to conduct social/affective and metacognitive strategies instruction.