Affective Factors In English Learning And Teaching

For the past few decades, language researchers and teachers have placed moreand more emphasis onto the individuals’ differences of the language learners,including affect, which is one of the most important factors of individual differences.Having attracted more and attention, affective factors have been the subjects of manystudies, which were carried out from different aspects of affect. Attaching importanceto the effect and influence of the affect factors in the process of students’ languagelearning can contribute to improving the learning efficiency and success. It is thedesired and ideal states for students to learn with happy mood. However, things do notgo as what we expect. Things always go like this: students feel anxious, worried,angry or even depressed in the learning process, so they cannot perform well inlanguage learning. In this way, in order to give the students better education andimprove their all-around development, it is necessary to take the affect seriously.This thesis studies learners’ affect in the aspects of motivation, anxiety andpersonality. As one of the most important factors in language learning, motivation istreated by the researchers and teachers as one of the crucial factors that affect secondor foreign language learning efficiency and success. Researches in this field havesuggested that it is vital to stimulate language learners’ motivation in improving theefficiency of second/foreign language classroom teaching. In many studies, anxiety isregarded as the greatest emotional barrier in the process of language learning. Anotherkey factor that effects second/foreign language learning is personality type, whichmainly includes extroversion and introversion. However, in present situation ofeducation in China, there are not enough researches on junior high students’ affect,especially on the students in rural areas.This study is to find out the problems existing in language learning byinvestigating the current situations of the students’ affect and the correlations betweentheir learning achievements and their affect. The investigation was conducted in arural junior high school in Qinhuangdao, Hebei Province, and the author collets dataand employs SPSS13.0for windows to analyze the data statistically.The results of the study indicate that the majority of the students have obviouslearning motivation. The subjects are all motivated by some kind of need or desire.What is more, the correlation between intrinsic motivation and learners’ Englishscores is notably positive and there is a positive correlation between extrinsicmotivation and subjects’ English scores as well. The investigation shows that a great many of subjects’ anxiety is high in thecurrent English classes. And there is a rather high negative correlation between theiranxiety levels and the subjects’ English scores, which means the more anxious alanguage leaner is, the worse he or she will do in the examinations. In other words,learners with lower level of anxiety tend to perform better than those with higher levelanxiety.In the present situation of language learning in China, there are more introvertedlearners than extroverted ones in current English learning. The investigation resultsalso show that there is an obvious positive correlation between personality type andthe subjects’ English scores.According to the results of this investigation, we can draw some implications andsuggestions that language teachers can transform their concept of teaching andpromote teaching methods so as to increase students’ motivation, interest and sense ofachievement, to lessen the bad influence of anxiety, and to teach students withdifferent personality types differently. And all of these can contribute to promoting theefficiency and success of teaching and learning, as well as students’ all-arounddevelopment.