A Study Of Application On Affective Teaching Methods In College English Teaching

In recent years, language teaching and learning in college English class hasshifted to a “student-centered” class, which emphasized the students’ wholedevelopment and also the relation between cognition and affect. With the rapiddevelopment of humanistic psychology, affective teaching methods are graduallypopularized in college English class in order to fit the requirements of students’ ownthoughts and feelings. This thesis studies mainly from learners’ affective factors, suchas motivation, attitude, self-esteem and also anxiety, so as to explore the affectiveteaching methods in application on college English teaching. During the process ofcollege English teaching practice, some teachers lack the affective teaching methods,ignore the cultivation of students’ humanistic qualities, and just pay attention to thedevelopment of learners’ knowledge and intellectual level. The traditional teachingmethods are so boring and tedious that most students are unwilling to learn English inclassroom teaching. It influences not only on forming positive affective factors, butalso on stimulating learners’ learning interest. Therefore, college English teachersshould make full use of affective factors under the new situation in college Englishteaching so as to avoid the lack of affective factors in college English teaching.Affective Filter Hypothesis was first proposed by Dulay and Burt in1977,mainly aiming at explaining how affective factors influence the process of foreignlanguage learning. In1980s, the focus of language teaching shifted from the study ofhow teachers teach to how learners learn from, which means more focuses onstudents’ participation and knowledge development instead of imparting knowledge.In this context, people began to pay attention to affective factors in language learning.On the basis of the theory, the famous American linguist Krashen developed it and putforward the Affective Filter Hypothesis. Lu Jiamei, a doctoral supervisor in ShanghaiNormal University proposed that the current teaching concept is to optimize Englishteaching with affective factors. Many researchers at home and abroad have madeexperiments on this issue and put forward some affective strategies on the basis of their experiments and studies. In the field of second language acquisition, manyresearchers study on the different angles of learner’s affective factors from vocabularyacquisition, reading, listening and oral English learning which may results thedifferent stages of English learning. Besides, there are also some researchers who holdthe view that the affective factors may influence on many aspects such as students’motivation, confidence, and anxiety through the process of English learning.This thesis attempts to investigate the affective teaching strategies, apply theaffective teaching methods to college English class teaching and finally find out agood solution to enhance the teaching effect through the researches based on relativeliterature and questionnaire survey. It sets out to conduct a survey of freshmen in JilinUniversity by questionnaire survey, aiming at finding out and making full use of theinfluence of affective factors to improve their language proficiency, while somespecific teaching methods are provided to apply in college English teaching class tostimulate students’ learning interests and develop teachers’ teaching performance,such as multimedia teaching methods, situational teaching methods, and groupdiscussion teaching methods. This study is carried out in hope of making a little bitcontribution to affective strategies in college English teaching and giving advices bothon teachers and students.This thesis is started with the introduction part. The background and significanceof the thesis are provided in this part. Besides, the layout of the thesis is alsomentioned. Then is the literature review of the thesis. In the first three sections, thedefinition and classification of affective factors are listed out, and some linguisticsstudies and theories in this field are quoted. As the theoretical basis of the followingresearch, the factors influencing English learners’ affect are summed up in order to getthe affective teaching strategies at last which are proposed in the last chapter of thepaper. Last section in this Chapter gives a review of the studies on this issue byresearchers both at home and abroad. The methodology includes the researchquestions, research subjects, tools, and experimental procedures are stated in detail.Take the freshmen, non-English majors in Jilin University as the subject, andaccording to the exploration and results based on the questionnaire analysis, theresearch questions of this paper are listed as follows:1. How the affective teaching methods affect in the process of college Englishteaching?2. How to apply the affective teaching methods to English teaching in college? According to the research, affective factors really affect the college Englishteaching because of the students’ motivation and lack of communication. On the basisof the students’ questionnaire, the paper aims to analyze this phenomenon and adopteffective strategies, which guide students to overcome the difficulties in Englishlearning and also improve the teachers to apply the affective teaching methods toEnglish teaching efficiency at last. The conclusion is written in the end of this thesis.Based on the analysis of the data research and the relative linguistic theories, thispaper offers some implications of this thesis andalso some hints both for teachers’language teaching in college English class and for students’ language learning. Thecollege teachers should pay attention to teaching method, make full use of the positiveaffective factors in English teaching and also improve the humanistic concern forstudents. While the students should enhance self-confidence, communicate withothers and also enhances the learning efficiency. The influence of the affectiveteaching methods in college English class and also some limitations and suggestionsof the research will be summarized at last.To sum up, with the support of affective theories and experimental statistics, itcan be concluded that there is a lack of affective strategies in most English teaching.Therefore, in the view of this situation, this thesis aims to appeal more people to payattention to affective factors, explore ways to eliminate students’ affective problemsand help them to construct positive affects in order to help student to learn Englishefficiency, and to promote the students to develop all-around. Through theconstructive comments, the college English teachers should take advantage of positiveaffective factors to build a harmonious English class.