A Study On Strategy For Constructing Affect In Foreign Language Learning For Vocational Students

With the development of humanistic psychology, researchers have discovered theaffective factors play a great role in foreign language teaching since the1960s. Andwith the growing enthusiasm of constructivism in China, more and more researchesabout constructivism and English teaching were carried out. This paper combines theaffect theory with constructivism, especially Jean Piaget’s Cognitive-developmentalConstructivism and Vygotsky’s Social Constructivism, to explore the strategies thatcan help vocational college students construct positive affect.Cognitive-developmental constructivism claims that individuals begin toconstruct personal meaning, their own personal understanding from their experiencesfrom birth. Knowledge is believed to be constructed by the individual himself insteadof being transmitted by others. Intellectual development includes two aspects: thecognitive and the affective, and they are inseparable. Social constructivism believesthat learners construct their knowledge through social interaction with their teachers,classmates and others. Cognitive-developmental constructivism and socialconstructivism teaching model provides us with a new perspective on the study ofaffect in FLL.This paper analyses the affect state of vocational college students in FLL throughquestionnaires, interview, experiment and observation, and finds out some reasonscausing affect problems, and explores the strategies to help students construct positiveaffect under the perspective of constructivism. During the experiment, the experiment class are taught in a constructivism way, in which students are the center of class andmore attentions are paid to the affect cultivation, while the control class are taught in atraditional way. The experiment results show that the students in experiment classobviously have higher self-esteem, stronger motivation, more positive attitude, lessanxiety and higher scores, which proves that constructivism teaching philosophy ishelpful for helping students construct positive affect.