Affective Factors In Senior Art School Students' English Learning And Solutions

This thesis, based on relevant theories concerning affective factors in second language acquisition, in combination with teaching practice and investigation, probes how to make good use of affective factors to improve learning efficiency effectively. The tradition of reasoning in Western philosophy has exerted great influence on people's understanding about emotion, whose education has long been ignored. In 1960s, with the emergence and advancement of humanistic psychology, affective factors in language teaching caught increasing attention. Theories and viewpoints, initiated by western humanistic psychologists represented by Erikson, Maslow, Rogers, etc., have brought important inspirations in education and language teaching. Since 1970s, linguists have taken fuller understanding of the fact that learners are being easily affected by affective factors in their second language acquisition in the process of learning.However, educators in China, especially in secondary schools, profoundly influenced by traditional grammar—method of translation, became aware of the function of affective factors rather late. In accordance with the further progress of the shunt from test-oriented education to quality-oriented education and new curriculum innovation, the importance and contemporary significance of affective factors in school education and teaching have increasingly been highlighted. New curriculum innovation has projected the core concept of offering the opportunity of getting active development to students. The newly issued Standard of English Curriculum of the Full-time Compulsory Education and Ordinary High School (Experimental Draft) labels affect as one of the most important components.This thesis, based on the illustration of relative concepts and theories, probes into the negative affective factors in the art school students' English learning using the form of questionnaire, which is set from the following five aspects: learning interest, attitude, motivation, anxiety and self-confidence. The biggest factor that exerts negative influence on students is anxiety. Those students who have no interest in English learning tend to have inappropriate learning attitude, which hinders their progress; and bad performance in their learning destroys their confidence in learning English, which results in their anxiety in learning; reversely, anxiety makes a negative effect on their English learning, which leads to a vicious circle. To eliminate their anxiety, the key point is to cultivate their interest in learning English and build up their confidence. Aimed at these problems, the author takes certain strategies: (1) to cultivate students' interest in art school by creating relaxed and happy atmosphere and frequent changing of teaching models of English lessons; to raise student's expectation towards success by improving their awareness of the significance of English learning and setting specific targets and methods; to improve students' learning efficiency by teaching them how to acquire new words and study effectively and encouraging them to do more reading listening tasks; to stimulate student's motivation by setting up learning files and helping them make positive self-evaluation. (2) to build students' confidence by helping them make correct self-evaluation, set up correct motivation, try to succeed, steering them make positive self-training and handling their mistakes in a correct way. At last, the author, through a comparative analysis of two tests, finds that her strategies have achieved certain effects.