Astudy On Effectiveness Of Affective Education In Middle School English Teaching

Affective education is a concept opposite to intellectual education and cognitive education.It is a part of education process, which focuses on students’attitude, feeling, belief, mood andso on. Linguistic scholars have researched and confirmed that cognition and affect are twoinseparably factors in language teaching. Psychological researchers have proved that affectplays an important role in promoting people’s cognition. However, the phenomenon ofemphasis on cognition, ignorance of affect exists broadly in middle school English teaching.Therefore, based on some related theories about affect and affective education, this thesisselects three affective elements (interest, anxiety and confidence) as the intermediary factorsof affective education in middle school English teaching and raises the questions of whateffects do affective education have on students’ academic record and affective attitudes(interest, anxiety and confidence) in their middle school English learning and whetheraffective education is better than the traditional education which ignores the cultivation ofstudents’ positive affect. This research is very significant for fostering students’ positiveaffects and improving the quality of middle school English teaching.This research belongs to comparative study. The basic experimental procedures arepre-test, giving lessons and post-test. The same teacher who is the researcher here uses thesame material in English teaching for a semester. The experimental subjects are120studentsin two classes of senior one from Luxi No.1middle school, Hunan province. These twoclasses are divided into experimental class and control class respectively. Before theexperiment, the teacher asks students in the two classes to complete the questionnaire ofaffective attitudes. And the teacher takes students’ academic records of the high schoolentrance examination as reference. The teacher gets110pieces of valid questionnaires (92%of the total number) by collecting the actual samples. During the teaching process, the teacheruses affective education method in the experimental class while employs traditional educationmethod in the control class which ignores the cultivation of students’ positive affects. Afterthe experiment, the teacher organizes the same students again to complete the samequestionnaires at the end of the semester and the teacher collects the final exam scores ofstudents as reference. At last, the researcher uses SPSS18.0to do the data analysis. Theexperiment results show that the application of affective education in middle school Englishteaching is beneficial to improving students’ learning interest, enhancing students’ learningconfidence, lowering their learning anxiety and improving students’academic record. Besides,the experiment results also show that affective education is better than the traditionaleducation which ignores the cultivation of students’ positive affects in middle school Englishteaching. This thesis aims to draw more teachers’ attention to the cultivation of students’ positiveaffect, to promote the application of affective education in middle school, to help studentsform positive affect, and to improve the quality and efficiency of middle school Englishteaching.