The Effects of Tolerance of Ambiguity on EFL Task-Based Writing

Abstract

This study was designed to investigate EFL task-based writing of Korean

university students who differed in the degree of tolerance of ambiguity. With

this goal, the present study attempted to explore whether or not a low degree

of tolerance of ambiguity interferes with the performance of task-based writing

and how a low degree of tolerance of ambiguity is related to the task-based

writing proficiency. Results showed that the degree of tolerance of ambiguity

affected the writing performance. In a holistic scoring system, the high

tolerance of ambiguity (HTA) group achieved better score than the low

tolerance of ambiguity group (LTA), and the influence of tolerance of

ambiguity varied with L2 proficiency. The results also indicated that in an

analytic scoring system, HTA and LTA groups' scorings on the components of

organization and vocabulary were different. Finally, this study suggests that

tolerance of ambiguity should be considered as an important factor for the

low proficient students in foreign language writing and that explicit and

direct directions should be included to diminish the uncertainty in an EFL

task-based writing class.