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lish reading holds an important part in theEnglish-learning of Chinese high school students. So it is necessary to do such aresearch regarding them as the research subjects. On the basis of those findingsachieved with college students, the present study attempts to probe into therelationship among TOA, FL reading anxiety and English reading achievement insenior high school students.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review

The second chapter will review definite concepts, major findings or claims andrelevant studies on the three variables concerning tolerance of ambiguity, foreignlanguage reading anxiety and English reading. It will present a conceptual frameworkassociated with research questions of the present study.

2.1 Tolerance of ambiguity
One of the early References to tolerance of ambiguity (TOA) was published in theAmerican Psychologist in 1948. Frenkel-Brunswik (1948) testified it briefly in a studywith 100 adults and 200 Californians aging from 9 to 14 and argued for TOA to beconceived of as “a gernal personality variable relevant to basic social orientation”(Frenkel-Brunswik, 1948:268). In her paper issued in 1949, she defined intolerance ofambiguity as an “emotional and perceptual personality variable” (Frenkel-Brunswik,1949:108). It is clear that she was “influenced by the work of Jaensch (1938) whoseearly psychophysical and perceptual work influenced many other researchers’assumptions”(Furnham &Ribchester, 1995:180). Frenkel-Brunswik (1951) arrangedmany behavioural dispositions of TOA, which may have attracted many researchers todo such studies in this area. Her definition of TOA was generated by case studymaterials gleaned from interviewees on high or low TOA levels. So “she argued thattolerance of ambiguity generalises to the various aspects of emotional and cognitivestyle, belief and attitude systems, interpersonal and social functioning and problemsolving behavior” (Furnham & Ribchester, 1995:180). Afterwards, TOA has attractedlots of researchers to do relevant studies over the last 60 years. The concept of TOA“has gone through changes since its conception in 1948” (Furnham, A. & Marks, J,2013: 725), and many foreign researchers except for Frenkel-Brunswik have proposedtheir own conclusions or definitions of TOA.
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2.2 Foreign language reading anxiety
Before foreign language (FL) reading anxiety is discussed, foreign language (FL)anxiety should be mentioned first. Actually anxiety is a psychological factor which isconnected with feelings such as fear, apprehension and uneasiness. FL anxiety usuallyhappens when a language learner is working at a foreign language, especially in theforeign language classroom. Thus FL anxiety can be defined as “the fear orapprehension occurring when a learner is expected to perform in the second or foreignlanguage” (Gardner and Maclntyre, 1991:112). Furthermore, the three distinctclassifications of FL anxiety were identified by Gardner and Maclntyre as stateanxiety, situation specific anxiety and trait anxiety. Trait anxiety was illuminatedas general personality traits, state anxiety as an emotional state,and situation specific anxiety as forms of anxiety within a given situation, whichmight better explain FL anxiety’s nature from the perspective of the specificsituation.Horwitz and Cope (1986) first proposed the concept of FL anxiety anddefined it a