AT and language learning

Many of the ambiguous situations are also common in language learning, be it in the classroom with a group of students (Ely, 1995) or individually when people engage in self-instructed language study (White, 1999). This is simply because both linguistic input and cultural knowledge is very likely to constitute one of the ambiguous situations described above.

How does AT interfere in the learning process?

Learning a foreign language, specially in the beginning,  may be a rather ambiguous process that involves processing unknown linguistic and cultural input, which might eventually cause uncertainty and/or confusion on the part of learners. Success in such a complex and uncertain process may involve a myriad of factors, one of which could be tolerance of ambiguity that learners exhibit during reading and listening.

Why is it important to be aware of student’s level of AT?

§ It is significant to explore this psychological construct since an awareness of how it influences foreign language learners and learning may alter the way teachers plan and execute their lessons, and help learners overcome their psychological barriers.

§ It will also aid teachers on how to deal with AT in relation to such factors as gender, proficiency level, strategy training and self-perceived reading success.

As such, in the simplest sense when students encounter new lexical and grammatical structures, they often face shortage or even a lack of information, multiple meanings, vagueness, and so on (Chapelle and Roberts, 1986; Grace, 1998). Ambiguity in language learning can cause anxiety (Ehrman, 1999; Oxford, 1999), which may create “a degree of apprehension and frustration which may ... [be] deleterious to progress” (White, 1999: 456).