A Study On Affective Factors In Middle School Students' English Learning

In recent years, affect becomes one of the main concerns in the curriculum reform of elemeatary education. In English New Curriculum Standards promulgated by the Ministry of Education in 2001, affect is required as an integral part of learning, and as one of the most significant teaching contents and teaching goals. Thus the teachers should integrate affect into language teaching so as to meet the requirement of quality-oriented education and students'all-around development.This thesis intends to study learners'four major affective factors: motivation, attitude, anxiety and personality. Motivation is a complex set of variables including effort, desire to achieve goals, as well as attitudes towards the learning of the language. It has been widely accepted by teachers and researchers as one of the key factors influencing the final achievement of English language learning. Attitude refers to the mental and neural state of readiness, organized through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence on the individual's response to all objects and situations with which it is related. Different attitudes lead to different learning strategies and successful learners tend to acquire positive attitudes toward the target language. Anxiety is regarded as a subjective feeling of tension, apprehension, nervousness and worry associated with an arousal of the autonomic nervous system. The personality of students also influences learners'language learning. So teachers should encourage students to be confident, active, talkative, outgoing and sociable and try to guide students to adapt themselves to different learning environments and learning tasks.The aim of this thesis is to investigate the current students'affective factors in middle school English learning so as to promote students'English learning, and meanwhile, improve teachers'affective awareness and qualities. To better understand the current situation of middle school students'affect in English learning as well as the effect of affective factors in English learning, the author selected 102 students in No.2 Middle School Attached to Shandong Normal University in Shandong province to make a questionnaire survey. 102 pieces of feedbacks were handed on and were regarded as effective questionnaires. Meanwhile, a teaching experiment lasting from November, 2007 to late June, 2008 was carried out in one of the author's two classes, one was the experimental class and the other was the control class. It is found out that students in the experimental class could have better English proficiency than those in the control class under the affective teaching. The scores of the pre-test and post-test were soon collected after the exams on November 10, 2007 and July 2, 2008 respectively. The data was counted and worked out with the help of computer software --- the Statistical Package for Social Science 13.0 (SPSS) for windows. All the collected data of the subjects'motivation, attitude, anxiety and personality as well as their pre-test and post-test scores was input into computer manually. Then SPSS was employed to process the data.Based on the investigation, the author finds that most of the subjects have obvious learning motivation. In most cases, it is a mixture of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation.With the intrinsic motivation, they are interested in learning the language, the culture, the customs of the English-speaking countries. On the other hand, they also hold the strong extrinsic motivation such as future job or further study to learn the language. Secondly, most of the subjects have a positive attitude.They could do as what their teacher required them to and finish the task or homework timely. They are willing to learn the language and have realized the differences between English and their mother tongue. Thirdly, there exists high anxiety in the current English class and the subjects'anxieties are mainly communication anxiety and classroom anxiety. Fourthly, as to personality, most of the subjects have moderate self-esteem, self-confidence in English learning, which can help them succeed in language learning. While those who are not confident of themselves usually choose the manner of inhibition in English classroom to avoid or even give up the opportunity to express their opinions. A teaching experiment lasting over seven months is carried out to solve the existing problems on affective factors by taking the following measures, motivating students in English learning, alleviating their anxiety and helping them form a positive attitude. The author finds that the affective teaching does help students achieve considerable progress.According to the survey results, it is evident that how to motivate the students, how to improve their attitude, how to reduce their anxiety and how to guide students to adapt themselves to different learning environments and learning tasks will be essential in English learning.At last, based on the survey results, analysis and discussion, implicationas and suggestions related to affective teaching in middle schools are put forward with the hope of improving teachers'affective awareness and qualities so as to meet the requirement of qualily-oriented education for the students'all-around development.