The Effectiveness Of Affective English Teaching At College

Affective English education has gained increasing attention right now and many teachers and scholars have carried out a great many studies and researches in such domain. But the current situation of affective English teaching is like a fable of blind men and an elephant, each research and study only touched one part of affective English teaching and the findings and results only contain section of the whole extent. As many teachers and researchers have already claimed that affective English teaching is not the opposite of cognitive teaching but an indispensable part of educational process, which will be considered broadly as aspects of emotion, feeling, mood, or attitude. But for a really long time, there are two misunderstandings of our English teaching. First, Chinese English educators and teachers have just paid main attentions on training students’cognitional ability but neglected the function of affective factors influenced during the teaching and learning procedure and also underestimate the effectiveness of affects played during the teaching and learning process, which ultimately leads to affective illiteracy. Second, even with the guidance of all those existing teaching theories and methodologies, the reality of Chinese English teaching and the students’practical English skills are still not satisfactory because the college English class is usually teacher-centered, text-translation and students passively followed, especially when there are more than60students in one classroom, which finally reduces students’interests in learning English. Yet, psychological researches have already confirmed a strong dynamic affect and positive emotions such as interest, self-esteem will have a direct role in language acquisition whereas negative emotions such as anxiety, fear, tension will hinder the learning effectiveness. Therefore, based on the related theory and the integration of affect and cognitive education, studies on the role of affective English teaching at college are discussed in order to cultivate students’positive attitudes and meanwhile improve the quality of college English teaching.The research takes humanistic psychology, people-oriented education concept and Krashen’s Affective Filter Theory as the theoretical basis and the main research tools are questionnaire survey, interviews, test papers from two main domains of theoretical and empirical aspects to study the effectiveness of the affective English teaching at college. For the sake of managing problems, some tentative effective strategies of affective English teaching at college were put forward. The research results indicate that affective English teaching is beneficial to improve students’ interest and self-esteem and decrease their anxiety in English learning, meanwhile enhance their effectiveness of language acquisition, It is significant for students to form positive affect, harmonize the relationship with teachers which will do a lot more to their future social life. Affective English teaching is helpful to improve college students’English learning and more importantly it improves the students’ practical English skills, and at the same time it is a key step to fulfill college English teaching goals in order to advance the holistic level of college English teaching and learning.