The Classificatory Analysis Of Affective Factors In Oral English Class

Affect, as a kind of ideology, is human's special property and intimately connected with the learning process. Especially when it goes to foreign language learning, affect and cognition are indispensable since there is an interrelation between these two factors. As the development of humanism theory, the educationists have diverted their attention to the research on the relationship between affect and learning. Although affect plays an undoubtedly important role in the foreign language learning, there still remains, both at home and abroad, two misleading points in English teaching: one is emotional illiteracy due to overemphasis on intelligence development, and the other is the neglect of the inseparable relationship between the affective factors and cognitive factors.In the process of training students'abilities of listening, reading, speaking, writing and translating, it is hard to enable students uttering several English words. Besides, speaking is closely related to the fluctuant feeling, since it's the biggest psychological challenge for Chinese students. As most of the oral English teachers now in China are foreigners, the strangeness and xenophobic mentality may also influence students'performance in the classroom. And the more they feel afraid to perform, the worse their oral English will be. The thesis intends to find out the interrelationship between the students'affect and that of their foreign teachers'in the oral English classroom, to deduce the spoken language proficiency difference caused by individual affective factors, and further to develop teachers'affective influence on the students. Concerning affective field, this paper makes a general classification as follows: one is to probe into the relation between the students'affective factors and their language proficiency from the perspective of students'affect, while another is to explore their influence on students from the perspective of teacher's affect. The experiment will be carried out in the oral English classroom with large amounts of quantitative and qualitative investigation. By means of long-term observation, interview and questionnaire investigation, this study explores the influence of teachers'affect on student's affect.The bi-method approach bears the results as follows:Firstly, EFL learners'affective issues, like character, attitude, anxiety, have a significant influence on oral English proficiency, which can be embodied in the following aspects: with strong sense of risk, expressive desire, extroversive students got more outstanding achievements, but they may not perform stably, and hereby, among them, gregarious extroversion is more beneficial for English studies than impetuous extroversion. Good attitude can lead to effective study. As to anxiety, instead of communicative anxiety, the biggest obstacle in classroom lies in test anxiety, and low anxiety offers more opportunities of classroom practice for students. Besides, students concentrate their motivation on instrumental one, so in this item, no outstanding motivation-outcome correlation was found out.Secondly, the current situation of students'affect- adjusting ability is not satisfactory. Although those who are good at adjusting affect according to the due situation always have excellent performance in oral English class, few students can manage by themselves while most rely on teachers'influential power. Teacher's positive affect can help students to establish self-confidence, reduce anxiety, and foster study motivation, while negative affect will produce the opposite effects.Thirdly, Teachers'affective expression exerts powerful influence on students'affection and thereby it would be beneficial to carry out emotional education. On the premise of cooperative method and humanistic education, this thesis proposes several new strategies to improve the role of affective factors in oral English classes.