Research On The Utilization Of Positive Affect To Optimize High School Students’ English Learning Attitudes

In the English New Curriculum Reform released by the national ministry of education in the new era, affective factor has been marked as one of the top five key objectives for English curriculum learning. The standards also require that during the teaching process, students’ positive affect should be fully inspired so as to optimize and clarify the English teaching objectives, and to achieve the most effective teaching courses, thus, to realize these two essential goals: improving language teaching effectiveness as well as enhancing the level of students’ cognitive and affective abilities. However, in the practical course of English teaching in high school, the optimization process of affective factors is less than satisfactory. Then, how to use positive affect to optimize high school students’ English learning attitudes? And what are the problems that teachers should pay attention to when applying affective teaching strategy? These questions need English educators to explore and research practically.Therefore, in order to cope with this issue, the author has selected “Research on the Utilization of Positive affect to Optimize High School Students’ English Learning Attitudes” as the research subject for the master thesis. In this research, the author designs affective teaching strategy according to the positive affect in affective teaching and affective goals raised by the New Curriculum Reform, taking two grade-1 classes in high school as the testing object, using questionnaires and comparative study method to carry out an investigation about the students’ English learning attitude. The questionnaire is mainly based on a foreign scholar, Stern’s definition of the affective goals, and also refers to the basic requirements about students’ affect released by the New Curriculum Reform together with some researches conducted by some scholars both at home and abroad, concerning on some affective factors in English affective teaching.Then, the author proposes a three-steps affective teaching strategy and tries applying this teaching strategy in English class. By statistically analyzing the questionnaire data, the author presents the changes in students’ English learning attitudes before and after the experiment, in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the utilization of positive affect to optimize high school students English learning attitudes.Finally, the author summarizes some problems which should be paid attention to in the affective teaching process and points out the limitations of this study, hoping to provide useful experience for both the future English affective teaching in high school and further research on affective teaching.