On The Effective Factors In English Learning And Teaching

Affect is the function of man's brain. It is the change of man's inner world and external expression caused by different attitudes towards objective things. One's affect toward particular thing or action or situation or experience is how that thing or that action or that situation or that experience fits in with one's needs or purpose and its resulting effect on one's affects (Krashen, Dulay, Burt. 1982). Affectivity 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 affectivity 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 the talking. The only job for learners to do is listening. 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. Therefore, it is urgent to take some measures. Nowadays, the elementary education is facing a great reform. In this reformation, one of the most important aspects is to pay more attention to the students'affective factors. It emphasizes to combine the students'affect with the language teaching. At the stage of elementary education, more and more attention is paid to not only the students'language input and language skills, but also students'affect. In contrast with other subjects, the relationship between language and affect is closer. Therefore, in new standard of English curriculum, affective factors are regarded as the more important target.There are two research traditions in the field of SLA research: the study of common processes of learning and the study of individual differences (IDs). The study of IDs covers those cognitive, affective and biological characteristics of individual learners. Cognitive factors have traditionally been thought of as the key factors in differential success in learning...