| Affect is the link between the teacher and the students in teaching and learning. In English teaching, active, healthy and pleasant affect has an important influence on the development of students'understanding and mastering English and their ability of using English comprehensively. It lies in creating a good teaching environment, arousing the students'interest, and cultivating students'autonomous, cooperative spirit and creative ability.Since the 1970's, humanistic language-teaching theory has begun to focus its attention on affect and personality in language teaching. In Krashen's Affective Filter Hypothesis, he states affective factors plays a very important role in second language acquisition. Since 1980's, some educators in China such as Lu Jiamei and Yelan, have been doing research on affect. The noteworthy ideas are"Enjoyable Education"and"Successful Education". In recent years, the curriculum design in China has also been influenced by humanistic-affective thoughts. A learner-centered language curriculum takes affect into account in many ways.However, affective education hasn't been paid attention to by many middle school teachers nowadays, especially the teachers teaching in the countryside. They only take much notice of the development of students'knowledge and intelligence, and overlook the development of their affect. As a result, the learners have poor interpersonal relationship and naturally they won't be physically and mentally healthy.The theories of constructivism and humanism are the theoretical base of the study of affective education. Piaget emphasizes the process of cognitive construction is the process of affective construction in his theory of affective development. Humanism theory plays stress on the importance of the learners'inner world and places the individual's thoughts, feeling, and affects at the forefront of all human development.In order to prove whether affective education is helpful to arouse the students'interest and improve their ability of using English comprehensively in the countryside middle schools, we did an experiment on affective education from March to July in 2006 between two classes of Senior One in Xing'an No.3 Middle School. During the whole period of the experiment, we interviewed a lot of students and conducted a specialized survey among 240 students of Senior One. We also analyzed other English teachers'teaching diaries and compared the students'exam scores between the class in which the teacher carried out affect education and the class in which the teacher didn't. Through the analysis of a lot of data and the result of the questionnaire, we find affective education is effective and practical for the students in the countryside senior middle school to improve their English despite their poor English base. Therefore, paying more attention to affective education in the countryside middle school is of great significance.This thesis is made up of five chapters.Chapter 1 is the introduction. It describes present situation in Xing'an No.3 Middle School, the importance of affective education and the research methods of this article. Chapter 2 gives the definition of affect, and states students'affective factors in English learning and overview of the study of affect in English teaching. Chapter 3 simply describes the author's experimental study of affective education between Class 501 and Class 502 of Senior One from March to July last year, and shows some methods of affective education in English teaching. Chapter 4 introduces a questionnaire among 240 students of Senior One in Xing'an No.3 Middle School. Based on the survey of questionnaire, the thesis specially analyzes item by item the affective factors that learners present in their English learning process. Chapter 5 is the conclusion. Through the overview of this article and the analysis of the experiment and survey, it states affective education is effective and practical in the countryside middle school even with relatively poor teaching conditions.
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