1. 研究目的与意义（文献综述）

there have been an increasing number of researches on ambiguity tolerance (at) in recent years. brown (2000: 119) states that ambiguity tolerance is "the degree to which you are cognitively willing to tolerate ideas and propositions that run counter to your own belief system or structure of knowledge". according to furnham (1994), tolerance for ambiguity refers to the way an individual (or group) considers and deals with information about ambiguous situations when they encounter a range of unfamiliar, complex or incongruent cues. furnham (1994: 403) states that "the person with low tolerance of ambiguity supposedly experiences stress, reacts prematurely and avoids ambiguous stimuli. however, a person with high tolerance for ambiguity perceives ambiguous situations/stimuli as desirable, challenging and interesting".

as a psychological concept, at has also shown its significance in second language acquisition which attracts much attention among foreign language teachers, since learners of a new language inevitably encounter unknown or complicated situations in which the ability of toleration and adaptation is needed to overcome them. rubin (1975) characterizes the good language learner as the one who is often not inhibited and who is willing to make mistakes in order to learn and to communicate, and who is willing to live with a certain amount of vagueness. researches indicate that students with relatively more at may have larger achievement in language learning as they are more comfortable with uncertainty and complexity and have better capability to deal with it, while learners who own less at are likely to experience anxiety and lack of confidence if they are not able to completely understand the text or follow every word spoken by the teacher. as white (1999: 456) emphasizes, ambiguity, if is not tolerated reasonably, can involve learners in a stressful situation in which language learning, risk taking, and application of the appropriate strategies may be negatively influenced, or "deteriorated".

both native and foreign scholars have conducted many studies on the relationship between at and respects such as listening, speaking, reading and writing in the process of second language acquisition and have already made considerable progress (guo, 2013; lou, 2015; ba#350;ouml;z, 2015; nezhad, 2013). as for listening and reading, according to former studies, at has a positive correlation to either of them, which means higher at results in better performance in language input. however, too high degree of at may also suggest casual attitude towards language learning, undue acceptance of random collocation and inability to distinguish right from wrong, which may manifest themselves in grammatical errors or wrong utilization of words in terms of language output such as speaking and writing.

2. 研究的基本内容与方案

This paper intends to study the effects of ambiguity tolerance (AT) of English major students on their reading and writing and explore the relationship between the respective role of AT in these two aspects as well. Former researches show the positive correlation between AT and reading ability, but also suggest that too high degree of AT may cause more inappropriateness in grammar and context especially regarding language output such as writing. Therefore it is important for English major students to find the optimum AT which serves best function to both language input and output. The subjects for this study are 100 English major juniors from Wuhan University of Technology. To measure participants' AT in the current study, Second Language Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale (SLATS) developed by Ely (1995) was used. It was the only questionnaire specially designed to measure AT in language learning context. Students are first given questionnaires of AT for grading and then tested on reading and writing. Scores are recorded and analyzed in order to study how different levels of AT act on these two aspects of English learning and whether there is a co-relation between AT in reading and that in writing for individual.

3. 研究计划与安排

before 20th january : settlement of the title

before20th march: submission of the outline

before 25th april : submission of the first draft

4. 参考文献（12篇以上）

[1] budner, s. intolerance of ambiguity as a personality variable [j]. journal of personality, 1962, 3(1), 29-50.

[2] christopher m. ely. tolerance of ambiguity and use of second language strategies [j]. foreign language annals, 1989, (5): 437-445

[3] ely, c. m. tolerance of ambiguity and the teaching of esl. in j. reid (ed.), learning styles in the esl/efl classroom, 1995, 87-95. boston: heinle and heinle.