An Empirical Study On The Application Of Affective Strategies To English Vocabulary Teaching In High Schools

The thesis studied the application of affective strategies to English vocabulary in high schools. The thesis focuses on how to use the affective teaching strategies to develop students’interest in learning English and improve the efficiency of vocabulary learning In China, research on affective teaching is on the increase. Some scholars have studied affective factors such as attitude, motivation, anxiety, personality. However, such research is too abstract, in other words, not concrete enough for practical use. Some studies just repeatedly state that affective factors deserves attention in language teaching. As an English teacher engaged in high school English teaching, the author realizes the importance of improving English vocabulary learning and feels the necessity to explore a set of affective strategies of vocabulary learning. These strategies, on the one hand, focus on the teaching process in the classroom, including considering affective factors in making vocabulary teaching plan, explaining the rules of word formation and helping students to use vocabulary; on the other hand, teachers should not neglect the students’ extracurricular affective state and take the appropriate affective strategies to monitor it such as issuing after-school questionnaire to assess students’ affective state and adjust teaching strategies according to the feedback. Therefore, an empirical study was carried out for one year, which can provide teachers with systematic affective strategies.This thesis is based on affect-related theories, aiming to answer the following questions:1) How can the application of affective strategies to English vocabulary in high schools improve students’interest in learning vocabulary?2) How can affective factors help improve the efficiency of vocabulary learning?This thesis adopts the methods of empirical study and quantitative analysis. Two high school classes which the author is in charge of have been selected as the experimental subjects for affective state assessment in vocabulary learning. A vocabulary teaching experiment is designed to confirm the validity of the proposed strategies. By analyzing the results of the survey and comparing the test scores before and after the experiment, the efficiency of the affective strategies has been testified.Our study has shown two findings:1) The application of affective strategies to English vocabulary in high school can stimulate students’ interest in vocabulary learning significantly.2) Affective factors in affective strategies can improve the efficiency of vocabulary learning greatlyThis experiment shows that affective teaching strategies proposed in this thesis are conducive to promote vocabulary teaching. It is necessary for the teachers in high schools to employ these strategies to upgrade teaching quality.This study has certain limitations because of time limit. The author thinks that a longer time experiment shall be carried out. Affective strategies requires for further improvement and enrichment. If possible, the author will try to put the affective strategies into our grammar learning.