A Study Of The Functions Of Affective Factors In Cooperative Writing Teaching For Non-English Major Students

Affect was once considered as an important category in psychology. We can’t deny that affective factors exert profound influence on language learning. In China, the traditional teaching concept has long been dominating English teaching. Namely, the whole teaching process is dominated by teachers, but students are passive recipients of knowledge. Teacher-student and student-student communications are rather scarce.Nowadays, cooperative learning is a very popular teaching approach, which aims to promote students’ mutual assistance and cooperation in one group to fulfill the same task to make progress.Therefore, in this thesis the author took some non-English major students as subjects to make a research on the functions of such affective factors as attitude, motivation, anxiety and self-esteem by applying cooperative learning approach in writing teaching. Research shows that, on the one hand, affect is of dynamic feature, students are easily influenced by both intrinsic and extrinsic affective factors, and teachers should adjust teaching strategies according to students’ affective state. On the other hand, cooperative learning approach is really helpful in assisting students’ improvement in writing competence, and learning in small groups can reduce the side effect of negative affective factors. Without doubt, there are also some drawbacks in this research. Firstly, the choice of subjects is confined to those relatively low-level students, more students of different levels should also be considered in the research. Moreover, the design of teaching in the class should be more scientific and reasonable, etc.