An exploratory study on the relationship between the ambiguity tolerance and participation of English language learners

Ambiguity tolerance is considered as a disposition that influences the individual in terms of his perspectives, his choices and his perception of the world. It could be defined as the embracement of the obscure and uncertain situations that we encountered in life. A certain level oftolerance is preferred as it helps to overcome these situations. Ambiguity tolerance also has an effect on language learning on the assumption that language learning is a complicated process that has several components. Ambiguity tolerance is manifested in language learning environments when learners are faced with the differences between their mother tongue and the target language. These differences may occur in various learning areas that are necessary for the progress of language skills and achievement.Language learning is an observable process which requires active participation of the learners. Participation during the activities is believed to be one of the best ways of learning a language as active involvement improves language learning abilities.It is significant to encourage participation in the classrooms and increase the participation frequency of the students to provide an effective learning environment. The purpose of this study is to reveal the relationship between ambiguity tolerance and participation frequency of English language learners. The possible relationship between ambiguity tolerance and gender differences is also aimed to be found out. The study was conducted with 62 sixth grade students who were studying at Menemen Emiralem Atatürk Secondary School during the education year of 2016-2017. Second Language Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale was applied to determine ambiguity tolerance levels of the participants individually. After the implementation of the scale, the students' participation frequency was identified through a 5-likert rubric. The correlation results indicated that there is a weak correlation between ambiguity tolerance and participation frequency of the learners which means that ambiguity tolerance is insufficient in predicting the students' participation frequency. Participation may be influenced by various factors such as classroom environment or the teacher rather than ambiguity tolerance. In addition, the results of independent samples t-test demostrated that there is no meaningful difference between ambiguity tolerance levels of males and females.