Dealing With The Affective Problems Caused By Negative Affect In L2 Classroom Through Caring Teaching

With the growth of humanistic psychology in the 1960s, affective factors in education were paid more and more attention to. Humanistic psychology stressed the need to unite the cognitive and affective domains in order to educate the whole person. Closely related to this, in the thesis affective factors in English classroom learning are paid great attention to. This paper attempts to probe into the issues of: 1) helping students overcome the negative affect (demotivation, lack of self-confidence, and anxiety), and further enlightening them to develop positive affect through modeling caring teaching behaviors; 2) generating a psychological climate conducive to the students' classroom learning to enhance students' activeness through caring teaching.This research was conducted in the course of College English for a freshmen class consisting of 35 girls majoring in nursing, who entered a vocational and technical college in Zhejiang in September 2005. The subjects of the study are the class and their English teacher. The research methods adopted in the study are a classroom case study, classroom participant-observation and phenomenological inquiry. The researcher mainly drew on the techniques of audio-recording talks, writing dairies and taking observation notes to collect data, such as transcriptions of the talks with Miss Ding (the leader of the English Teaching and Research Group) and the students, the teacher's teaching journals, the students' dairies, and a letter from the whole class.This research conducted an explanation-building data-analysis. The major findings obtained from the data are the following. First, the states of negative affect are unconducive to the classroom language learning and teaching - making the classroom inactive, chilling the students' activeness and causing an 'affective filter', dampening the teacher's enthusiasm, and what is worse, seriously demotivating the students and finally affecting their learning outcomes. Second, the main demotivating factors, including hypercriticism, lack of caring, inactiveness, and lack of commitment sense, are concerned more or less with the teacher's stance and behaviors. Third. care is a key with magic-the teacher can open the students' locked door of heart through loving care, and the students can be greatly motivated by means of caring teaching. Fourth, the teacher can deal with the students' negative affect of demotivation, lack of self-confidence, and anxiety, through his/her caring teaching behaviors - caring for their inmost state or encouraging them. Fifth, facial expressions are the most direct and true indication for students' feelings, sensations and thoughts, and thus these expressions function as the windows for the teacher to know of how the students think and feel. Sixth, classroom communication between the teacher and the students is a kind of affective communication. It is the facial expressions that play an important role in classroom communication, in which the students and the teacher communicate affectively through facial expressions.Based on the author's informed professional reflections, some implications are tentatively drawn from the findings of this study: 1) caring teaching is regarded as exploratory practice, through which a psychological climate conducive to high quality learning is created; 2) the teacher should be a caring teacher, who is able to move up the ladder of caring from ethical caring to natural caring, arid unite physical caring and mental caring; 3) some illuminations on teacher development are gained from caring teaching practice.In a word, this study ventures to provide an alternative way of handling the affective problems caused by the negative affect through caring teaching.