Activating Affective Factors Of Students With Learning Difficulties To Improve Their English Learning Attitudes And Outcomes At A Chinese Vocational School

In recent years, affective factors have attracted more and more people's attention. As we all know, students with positive emotional factors (attitude, interest, cooperation) often produce positive learning outcomes. However, in the vocational education, there is little chance to work on students'affective factors in teaching practice. Because of this, a large number of students with learning difficulties (SWLDs) appeared in vocational schools. In order to change the learning attitude of these SWLDs, the researcher carried out an experiment on changing students' learning attitudes by activating their affective factors. By implementing cooperative learning and multiple-level teaching, the researcher hoped to transfer students' learning attitudes, stimulate students' learning interest, train students'spirit of cooperation and improve their learning outcomes.The research lasted one year and 20 students with English learning difficulties were chosen as the research subjects from two parallel classes in Grade 2 in the vocational school where the researcher teaches. To avoid disturbing their normal learning, the experiment was carried out in secret. The researcher used monitoring system to take notes of the subjects' performance. After the experiment, by comparing the pre-test and post-test scores, the survey data before and after, the researcher found that students'learning attitudes and achievements did not have much significant change, and the comparison of classroom observation notes did not show students' progress in learning attitude. What had caused such result? After having an interviewing with the experimented students, and reading through some books about education which were written by domestic and foreign experts. The researcher found that the change of emotional factors is a slow process. Perhaps due to the limited time, students' habit of learning is not totally changed yet. Therefore, the researcher had a following-up investigation. The experimental results were satisfactory. In this case, the researcher hopes the other researchers can continue this effort and achieve more positive results. She also hopes that the current experiment can provide some practical tips for latter researchers.