Affective Factors For Vocational School English Teaching

Affect is the function of man's brain. It is the change of man's inner world and external expression caused by different attitudes towards objective things. One's affect toward particular thing or action or situation or experience is how that thing or that action or that situation or that experience fits in with one's needs or purpose and its resulting effect on one's affects (Krashen, Dulay,Burt1982). Affective factor is one of the main factors that affect teaching effect.But for a long time,people only valued the function of intellectual factors in language teaching and neglected affective factors. Until the 1960s, people began to pay attention to the function of affect in language teaching. In the late 1970s and 1980s,linguists were searching for ways to enrich language teaching by incorporating affect of learners. Thus some methods taking into account the affective side of language learning come to the fore, such as Suggestopedia, Silent Way, Community Language Learning, and so on. Besides, some theories were put forward, for example, Krashen's Affective Filter Hypothesis and Input Hypothesis, were famous. In recent years, more and more scholars have transferred focus of research on foreign language from how to teach for teachers to how to learn for students, inquiring into learners' process of psychology of language learning and effect on foreign language learning from affective factor. But according to Lu Jiamei's investigative study of middle-school teachers, only 8.81 percent of teachers carry out affective education in the process of teaching and 50 percent of teachers don't consider affective factors of students at all. That is to say,the function of affect in teaching is still not taken seriously by most of the teachers. So the writer wants to prove the significance of connecting the affective factors with subject teaching through this thesis to stimulate more teachers to pay attention to affective factors in teaching .The thesis contains five parts. The first part expounds situation of affective education in foreign language teaching. The second part discusses some theories on affective factors and sizes up the characteristics of affect and relation between affective factors and language teaching. The characteristics of affect concern the process of psychology, the state of mind, the contents of psychology, the individual character and so on. The third part discusses the function of affect in English teaching through experiment. The forth part discusses the enlightenment of affective education and the application of affective education in vocational school English teaching. The fifth part is a conclusion of the whole thesis.