“The greater
the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure”
Milan
Kundera
Abstract________________________________________
Ambiguity in communication
represents a big threat for EFL learners. They immediately surrender and stop
learning as soon as they couldn’t understand the connections of items which
might help them construct meaning. Therefore, the teacher has to handle this
problem:
1. Either
by never using texts with ambiguous words or structures
2. Or by
teaching the learners how to cope with ambiguity.
I guess
the first solution is completely inappropriate because texts in real life
situations are not all ambiguity free. Besides, it kills creativity and
deactivates thinking. So, the second is the most convenient approach although
it requires hard work and prudence to implement it.
Tolerating
ambiguity is “a tendency to perceive or interpret information marked by
vague, incomplete, fragmented, multiple, probable, unstructured, uncertain,
inconsistent, contrary, contradictory, or unclear meanings as actual or potential
sources of psychological discomfort or threat” (Ely, 1995, p. 88).
Striving
to learn a foreign language is already an indication that the learners are aware
of the difficulty of the task and that they are ready to tolerate novelty as
well as ambiguity. Despite the diversity of learning styles and personality
traits, the students, especially the prejudiced
ones, have to be tolerant towards pragmatic ambiguity so as to be able to
smash the barriers of dogma which generally impede them from accomplishing
normal and successful interaction with ambiguous input of any sort. Ambiguity intolerance
can be summed up as the rejection of and resistance to the unusual or different
intermittent stimuli which don’t correlate with previously formed ideas and adopted
attitudes.
This
paper aims at showing how comprehension of a text should not only focus on understanding
the explicit but also the inferential meaning with a little inclination towards
training the learners to tolerate vagueness since moderate level of ambiguity
can have very positive effects on poor or incomplete schemata. Apart from
Frege*, perhaps, everybody else agrees that ambiguity is a very powerful
tool. In a language learning context,
simplicity but not simplification is what urges the learners to grasp the
technique of assimilating the dubious and ambiguous about texts in order to be
able, later on, to go further with undertaking ambiguity resolutions in real
life situations.
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* Gottlob Frege (1848/1925), German
philosopher, Mathematician and logician.
