An Empirical Study Of Affective Factors In Senior High ELT

The term Affect has long been touched on in the older psychological literature and has begun to catch eyes of educators, psychologists and linguists since the second half of the twentieth century. In this paper, affect is considered as aspects of emotions, feelings, moods or attitudes which condition learners' behaviors (Arnold, 2000).With the development of humanistic psychology in the 1960's, people's attention is gradually invited to the affect of human being. The research in language learning and teaching is also shifting more weight to learners' affective domain. Educators have regarded learners' affective development as an essential educational objective and agreed on that the affective and cognitive domain in education is inseparable (Piaget, 1981). This paper intends to investigate the affective state of the students in senior high school English teaching and learning, and analyze its influence on their English learning. The result is provided that in high school English classes in China, the two sides of learning-cognition and emotion are now separated from each other seriously, which attach too much importance to cognitive side of language learning while neglecting the function of affective factors. Most students study English by their self-discipline to a certain extent. The writer thinks it is the main reason for the low efficiency of English teaching and learning. The research is guided by the following questions: First, what about the students' affective state and its influence on their English learning? Secondly, What are the teachers' perceptions of the students' affects? Thirdly, what's a students' ideal English teacher?The study explores the affective factors including individual factors and relational factors, which may facilitate or debilitate students' English learning. The writer adopted questionnaire and interview as instruments. The results show that the affective state of the students is not encouraging. Affective problems exist among the learners extensively, which is an obstacle to improve the efficiency of English...