A Study On Affect In EFL Teaching

Based on the theories of educational psychology, methodology of FLT, linguistics, neurobiology, and so forth, along with a number of persuasive experimental data and analyses, the present study aims to show that attention to affect in EFL classroom teaching is conducive to students' personal growth and a more holistic development.The primary research method will be both qualitative and quantitative. In the qualitative research, the author elaborates the vital role affect plays in EFL teaching by demonstrating the close relationship between the imparting and obtainment of knowledge and human's subjective emotion, and then puts forward some affective principles in teaching EFL. In the quantitative research, 128 senior high school students from Jiangsu Province and 48 university students from Guizhou Province were chosen. To minimize subjective influences on the study, special precautions were taken in the selection of the way of testing (Norm-referenced tests were employed.), the kind of questions asked in the questionnaire, the way in which the data were analyzed (The statistical software of SPSS and Microsoft Excel were used.), etc. The results of the two experiments indicated that students in the affective EFL classroom did significantly better (p < .05) in cognition than their comparisons or than before. Furthermore, the analyses of the two surveys showed that attention to affect in EFL teaching helped students enhance their interest in EFL learning, cross-cultural awareness, self-confidence, interpersonal intelligence, and so forth.In the view of the author, EFL learning and use is an interactive process, which is intimately connected with the learner's and teacher's emotional being, tasks and contexts. The purpose of classroom teaching is not only to transmit content information. More importantly, as EFL teachers we should cultivate our students' positive and healthy affect and promote their development as a person, and these affective goals should become one of the most significant goals of EFL teaching. To do this, in EFL teaching we need to be concerned with both their affective and cognitive natures and needs, and we should unite cognition and affect together and use them together.