A Research On Senior English Reading Involving Affective Factors

On the basis of the achievements in affective education and the teaching and learning of reading made by scholars at home and abroad, the author explored some ways about how to put affective education theories into the practice of the teaching of English reading in the hope of making both cognitive and affective progress and achieving the goals of senior English reading.As is well known, reading is one of the necessary parts of English teaching and learning. It plays an important role in language proficiency because it is an important means to gain information as well as one of the most important linguistic skills. Reading comprehension is influenced so much by many factors, such as language knowledge, background knowledge, reading materials, cognitive ability, learning styles and even reading habits that it is a complicated process.At present, many students in ordinary senior high schools are not so active in reading that they are forced to read and achieve little through spending much time. They just try their luck to get high marks in reading tests, which makes it necessary for English teachers to help the students cultivate their active affective factors and take an active part in reading under the same external conditions.Traditional teaching and learning in English reading class, to much extent, puts emphasis on such external factors as reading strategies, reading modes, and reading skills, but ignores the influences of internal factors: affective factors. Meanwhile, modern education calls for humanistic and the student-centred teaching. In response to the tendency, the China's Ministry of Education lists affective education as one of the five goals of English teaching and learning in " Curriculum Criteria of English Teaching and Learning for Senior High Schools" so as to draw the attention of teachers and researchers of English. According to the above "Curriculum Criteria", the affective factors in this paper refer to students' motivation, interest, self-confidence, will, cooperation, the sense of motherland and the international horizon. It can be found in the theories about educational psychology and SLA that the learners' attitudes, interest, cooperation have much to do with learning effects directly. Therefore, basing on the above concepts and theories, the author tries to put the affective factors into the practice of dealing with the teaching materials, teaching process and evaluation of reading in affective ways and suggests some ways to deal with reading involving affective factors.This paper includes five parts. Part 1 introduces the history and significance of affective teaching. Part 2 illustrates the essential theories about affective teaching and reading. In Part 3, two questionaires about reading are done to know about senior high school students' affective states in reading. Part 4 is the most important part of this paper, which introduces the study about affective teaching in reading. This part shows how to develop active affect in English reading class, i.e. how to deal with teaching procedures, teaching materials and how to evaluate students' reading in affective ways; then the author analyses and discusses the result of the study. Part 5 is the conclusion .