A Study On Influences Of Affective Factors Of Vocational School Students In English Learning

In the process of second language learning, affect plays an important part:the affective state of the learner directly influences the learner'learning actions and learning results. Positive affective factors can greatly facilitate the language learning process and make the learning activities more efficient while negative ones can cause affective learning disturbances,which reduce learning capacity. In the teaching practice, the author finds that English is one of the worst subjects in vocational secondary school. For most of the vocational school students, their failures on language learning are caused by affective factors and the affective problems they meet in learning process are far more than learning itself. English as a basic course in vocational school is becoming more and more important to make graduates fit the needs of the labor market. Therefore, in the context of greatly advocating vocational education and promoting the reform of vocational English course, it is meaningful and necessary to understand the affective states of vocational school students,, help them solve affective problems in English learning and change their passive positions in learning.This thesis selects five factors as research subjects from two aspects of affective factors involving in language learning (learner as an individual and learner as a participant in a socio-cultural situation. They are self-esteem, anxiety, motivation, classroom setting and relationship between teacher and learner. The author seeks to understand the affective states of the vocational school students in English learning as well as the relationship between the five factors and the learning outcome.A questionnaire is designed based on these five factors which is distributed to 170 students from Dalian Light Industry School. Through quantitative analysis to questionnaire results the author finds that vocational school students in English learning has shown poor self-esteem, high level of classroom anxiety but low level of test anxiety, lack of intrinsic motivation, a passive position in the language classroom and desire to establish harmonious teacher-student relationship.According to the analysis of the results of the questionnaire, the authors conducted a comparative experiment. The affective teaching strategies are adopted in Experimental Class while the traditional methods are continually used in English teaching, the experimental result indicates that affective strategies and classroom activities are available to promote students' positive affective factors and improve the academic achievement. The vocational school English teachers should be vigorously to carry out humanistic learning activities; change the previous traditional ways of evaluation; pay more attention to the affective development of students; cultivate students'positive affect,thus they can form harmonious and cooperative relationship with society and other people.