| Because it bears much relevance to individual's emotional reactions to temperamental state in any situation, affeetivity is regarded as omnipresent in human thinking and social interaction. Foreign language learning is without exception since it takes human thinking as its indispensable condition and takes social interaction as one of its purposes. Thus, the trend that affeetivity has become the concern of the language researchers and teachers gets more and more obvious. According to researches in different directions, the significant relationship has been proven to exist between affective variables and foreign language learning. Therefore, the findings must have some enlightenment for foreign language teaching (FLT) since teaching and learning are two closely related and integrated processes in language education in classroom. However, influenced by the traditional language education, the development of cognitive skills has dominated and still dominates the FLT in classroom, so does ELT in China (English is described as a foreign language in China). For decades ELT in our country puts priorities on cognition, knowledge, and receptive skills while overlooking learners' affective abilities and creativity. Teachers manage the class and occupy most of thetalking. The only job for learners to do is to listen. They seldom exchange their feelings and learners have little responsibility for the teaching and learning styles, materials and evaluation. As a result, learners only concentrate on passing examination and their competence in language use is very low. That the students who pass the College English Test Band 4 and 6 cannot speak and even make simple conversation is a case in point. Therefore, it is urgent to take some measures.Language researchers have taken interest in learners' similarity in the order and rate of second language acquisition (SLA) for a long time. But for learners' individual differences, the researches are at the initial stage. Since the 1970s, when scholars realized that language learning and teaching is a unique endeavor, the efforts to focus on affectivity have been made. The affective variables, which were once regarded as the psychological domain, show their effect on language learning. Among them, motivation, attitudes and language anxiety are closely related to the English language teaching (ELT) and can be adjusted by the instruction in classroom. Therefore, it deserves considering how the three variables function and how to develop the students' positive affectivity. It must be pointed out that some affective factors can be adjusted because of their dynamic characteristics. But at the same time, the dynamic characteristics make the results of researches difficult to be measured which increases the difficulty of the study of affectivity. So studying all the affective factors or taking all the affective variables into consideration seems impractical and impossible. These are the reasons why I choose motivation, attitude and language anxiety as the core of my investigation.As to the feasibility of this study, the nine-year teaching experience enables me to notice the influence of individual differences on language teaching and learning. What is more, I have the chance to observe the change before and after some techniques are applied to the classroom setting. Thus, this dissertation argues for the significance of affectivity, and particularly its role in ELT of non-English majors. Because of the existence of learners' differences, the affective reactions to English learning are different, some of which enhance learning while some others impede learning. Therefore, another point I want to argue in this dissertation is that teachers should maximize the positive affective factors to arouse learners' positive affective reactions and to encouragelearners' active participation in English learning. Then, how to incorporate cooperative learning, one of the techniques to improve positive affectivity, into classroom will be introduced and the significance of its results will be...
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