Students' Affective Development In Senior High School English Teaching

Affective development is an integral part of the growth of young students. However, in many high schools in China, teachers often lay emphasis on knowledge learning, grammatical explanation and examination skills, and seldom do they bother to understand students'inner world. Too much academic pressure, disagreeable relationship between teachers and students, and negative self-evaluation have brought about affect recession and emotional failure, which eventually hamper the development of students'emotional qualities. As a result, current high school students'emotional qualities, especially their sensibility, is at a low stage compared with students of other age groups.This article reviews theories on emotional factors from the psychological and pedagogical perspective, analyzing the problems in English learning and teaching and the students emotional status. Despite the fact that the vast majority of students hold a positive, or neutral emotional attitude toward the English society and culture in general, the development of emotional qualities still noticeably lags behind. Anxiety, suppression and lack of self-confidence affect students learning motivation and learning effect, and consequently, hamper the English learning process.Accordingly, the article maintains that, on the one hand, high school English teaching should cultivate positive emotional attitudes that enhance students' self-esteem and reduce their anxiety, and explore the way to take advantage of emotional development to optimize English teaching. On the other hand, by optimizing the teaching content, teaching organizations, learning environment and evaluation, we should train and develop students'overall feelings, including their senses of patriotism, love, happiness, confidence, well-being, self-reliance, emotional capacity, and emotional experience.