Promoting Affect In College English Learning Through Cooperative Learning

Psycho-linguistics studies have shown that cognition and affect are two of the indispensable aspects in foreign language learning and teaching. Since the development of humanism in the 1960s, more and more attention has paid to the role of affective factors in cognitive learning process. Affect refers to learners' emotion, feeling, mood and attitude in learning processes. Foreign language teaching studies also find that affective factors play an essential role in foreign language teaching: affective factors influence the success and failure in foreign language teaching and learning; affective factors and cognitive factors are not separate from each other, and they are the important part of the whole-person development. However, current foreign language teaching in China has largely neglected affective factors, which leads to the unsatisfactory effect college English teaching in some universities.This thesis discusses how to employ Cooperative Learning (CL) in college English teaching to stimulate learners' positive affect, and to improve the learning effect. CL refers to a system of teaching and learning strategies which take small groups as the basic form of the classroom structure, requiring interaction among group members engaged in tasks in which all members have both something to contribute to and learn from the other members. The research questions studied in this thesis are:1. In what way can co-operative learning help teachers enhance students'positive affective factors?2. In what way can co-operative learning help teachers reduce students'negative affective factors?3. How enhanced positive affective factors and reduced negative affective factors benefit students' learning?Based on 3-semester research on Grade 2007 majoring in Japanese in Haihua College from Liaoning Normal University, the research findings show that teachers can stimulate learners'motivation, expand students'interest, and promote the inner connection between learners'affective factors and English learning through effective CL teaching strategies. Teachers also can employ students'various affective needs (such as reducing learning anxiety, enhancing self-confidence, etc.) in English learning process and integrates English teaching and affective education by means of CL teaching strategies, which makes for facilitating learners'linguistic competence, improving English teaching effect, but also makes for the development of learners'non-intelligent factors.