Ambiguity Tolerance Essay

1391 Words3 Pages

Defining ambiguity tolerance is complex. Chappelle and Roberts (1986) define ambiguity tolerance as “a person’s ability to function rationally and calmly in a situation in which interpretation of all stimuli is not clear” (p.30). Tolerant people are better able to tolerate the feelings of anxiety and uncertainty. They will perceive and interpret ambiguous situations more adequately, in a realistic way, without denying or distorting parts of its complexity. Tolerant people are likely to elaborate more adaptive and better coordinated behavior. They can withstand the discomfort of the ambiguous situation long enough as to accommodate and generate a more appropriate and flexible response to it. It was concluded that tolerant individuals should …show more content…

Thus, tolerance of ambiguity can be considered as a quality directly connected with one’s personality or one’s cognitive style (Ely, 1989; Ehrman, 1993, 1994). Ehrman (1993) maintains that a person who has tolerance of ambiguity operates at three different levels in learning: intake, tolerance of ambiguity proper, and accommodation. On the first level, tolerance enables learners to receive linguistic input. Students with tolerance of ambiguity can perceive and accept new information even though it involves many unknown elements. The second level involves being able “to hold contradictory or incomplete information without either rejecting one of the contradictory elements or coming to premature closure on an incomplete schema” (p. 331). At this level, the learner has taken new information in and needs to deal with contradictory or incomplete information (e.g. inferring meanings of unknown vocabulary in an article). The last level involves adapting the self-according to new material. That is, this level entails integrating new information with the existing schemata, restructuring the latter. Ambiguity tolerance could be defined as the degree of acceptance of the cognitive challenge associated with

More about Ambiguity Tolerance Essay

Open Document