| English is a language full of beauty. English is beautiful in sounds, letters and characters, word formation, figures of speech and so on. The beauty in English sounds lies in rhythms and rhymes; the beauty of word formation lies in compounding, conversion and derivation; the beauty in rhetoric lies in the use of simile, metaphor, personification, onomatopoeia parallelism structure, etc. There are numerous materials in senior English textbooks for aesthetic education.Maslow's pyramid of needs (1970) shows that aesthetic need is at the second highest stage of human beings' needs. Once aesthetic need is met, human beings will be inspired of endless motivity.Though the reform in English teaching has been on for many years in China, a universal problem in senior EFL teaching is obvious exam-oriented tendency. Shu Dingfang (2004) points out: The aim of many students' learning English is to pass some exam, and almost all of them are learning English by doing exercises. This kind of "Exercises Strategy" makes both students and teachers tired of English, forgetting its natural beauty. Therefore, teaching effect is far from satisfactory. Aesthetic infiltration is imperative under the situation. It can cultivate students' aesthetic sentiment, intelligence, imagination as well as creativity, making students' comprehensive qualities develop in the round.Through the theories of Aesthetic Education, Krashen's Affective Filter Hypothesis, Cognitive Linguistics and Curriculum Criteria for Senior High School English, our research probed into the nature beauty in English; put forward the necessity of the implementation of aesthetic infiltration in senior high school EFL teaching; teachers should arouse students' favor of English and cultivate their lasting interest in learning English by paying attention to students' affection, excavating the essential beauty of English for students to comprehend and appreciate English from various aspects. As a consequence, students' learning enthusiasm and autonomy are fostered; they can learn English with various resources and in various learning ways, forming life-long learning ability.We chose one of the author's classes as the experimental class. This class with fifty students entered Senior One of the Middle School Affiliated to Hunan University in September, 2006. We spent a term (four months) carrying out our experiment. In the process of the experiment, we took various measures to carry out aesthetic infiltration; we asked the students to fulfill the questionnaires, pre-experiment questionnaire and post-experiment questionnaire. The collected data show that these practices proved true our hypothesis that implementing aesthetic infiltration in senior high school EFL Teaching improves students' interest, confidence, automatic ability, team work in study and integrated humanistic qualities. To gain good teaching effects, we teachers should carry through aesthetic infiltration, develop various teaching resources, create English learning environment for the students, cultivate the students' good habit of learning English and instruct them to take effective learning strategies.
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