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

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.