An Investigation And Exploration Of Affective Factors In Junior Middle School English Learning

Affective factors in language learning and teaching have been a buzzword in foreign language acquisition in the recent twenty years. But, conservative teaching methods are still popular in language teaching of China. Teachers always pay much attention on the results of language acquisition, and little on cultivating learners'affective factors. From the author's point of view, the maturity of students'affective factors is the achievement of ability by which one can become an all-round person. As long as the student learns with strong motivation, right attitude, suitable learning strategy, exactly, he can enjoy the learning process. That is the essence of learning.From the theoretical point of view, this thesis firstly takes a review on the studies of affective theory from its historical development. These views show that great achievements have been made in this field and also this part provides the theories upon which we put the latter investigations. In addition, how to motivate the learners'affective factors into an expected direction and the points which the teachers and the parents take are closely related with each other. This provides us with a new perspective. This part is composed of Chapter one and two.Secondly, from the practical point of view, this thesis takes a review on the studies of affective factors at home and abroad upon which the way of this investigation is based. In this thesis we will explain the relationship between the learning strategies and the learning achievement through the application of affective theory, cognitive theory, need theory and the theory of psychology types by the method of data statistics contrast. This part is composed of Chapter three and Chapter four.The domain of this investigation covers four middle schools and 500 students in the two areas ( three are in the city, another in the countryside ) and applying three questionnaires in which motivation and attitude, the role of teachers and parents, the learning strategies of students, and students'personality and anxiety in learning are included. More than 1400 answers were of validity. The interviews with teachers and parents were also concerning about these main aspects. At last, all the data gotten above were analyzed by the software SPSS and the results were presented and described by the stables in the paper.Generally speaking, this is an investigation that explores the affective factors deeply and completely in the teaching process from different angles. It might avoid the limitation coming from the behaviorism and mentalism. The author noticed that the acquisition of the ability of affective factors was the effect not the cause. Besides, this is regarded as a new research perspective because it is focused on the synthetical factors of affection about the learners, teachers and parents which should be a harmonious group.