The Relationship between Iranian English learners’ Level of Ambiguity Tolerance and Its effect on Word Inferencing Strategy Use in Reading Comprehension

دانشگاه ولي عصر(عج) رفسنجان

كارشناسي ارشد

This study explored the relationship between language learning strategies and EFL learners’ ambiguity- tolerance. It involved twenty participants who were chosen from both high and low intermediate learners of Yazd University English Academy. The study sought to find out the relationship between Iranian EFL learners’ ambiguity-tolerance and the word inferencing strategy in reading comprehension by applying thinking-aloud protocol. For the study, the Second Language Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale and the Reading Comprehension Test were used. The findings revealed that there was a low relationship between ambiguity-tolerance and proficiency level in reading comprehension. It was also found that there wasn’t any significant difference between ambiguity-tolerance and gender in reading comprehension. The findings also indicated that there was a low relationship between ambiguity-tolerance and inferencing strategy in the process of reading comprehension. To sum up, the findings of the present study lead us to the conclusion that having a successful lexical inferencing for guessing the meaning of the unknown lexical items in reading comprehension correlate slightly with the participants' ambiguity-tolerance and proficiency levels. Since in some occasions the participants with different ambiguity-tolerance and proficiency levels can infer the unknown lexical items in reading comprehension by regarding the clues in the texts successfully. The findings of the current study enable the teachers know their students, therefore they can help them to learn English as best as they can. Additionally, teachers can encourage the learners to discover their own appropriate language learning strategies for overcoming the reading comprehension difficulties. This could not be achieved just by applying the strategies but also by providing the learners with different tasks of modeling comprehension processes as making prediction, linking information in text with prior knowledge, and monitoring comprehension in order to analyze the contextual clues of the text for being successful in inferring the unknown lexical items in reading comprehension.

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دانشگاه وليعصر رفسنجان

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