An Investigation Into English Affective Teaching In The First Year Of Senior High School And Suggested Strategies

With the booming development of society and the increasing globalization, English as an international language has played a more and more prominent role in all walks of our life around the world. So a lot of education innovators and scholars have paid much more attention to English education. For decades, though English education in senior high school has developed gloriously and made great progress, some problems still exist. Due to the traditional teaching concept and the pressure of the examination-oriented education, many in-service teachers prefer to adopt the grammar-translation teaching method. They tend to give more attention to students’ cognition, neglecting their emotion, which will not only affect students’ cognitive development but also do harm to their all-round development. Therefore the New Standard of English Curriculum issued by our country’s Ministry of Education lists the concern of students’ affective factors as one of the five subject objectives. This reform has a significant influence on teachers’ teaching efficiency as well as students’learning behavior. Based on this new course reform, many domestic and foreign educators have done a lot of researches about emotional teaching. But most of the researches focus on the importance, functions, value and principles of the emotional teaching. There are fewer studies concentrating on the present situation of English emotional teaching in senior high school. Based on the previous studies, this thesis attempts to make a detailed investigation into the present situation and problems of English emotional teaching in senior high school. The subjects of this research are105English students and10English teachers from Tianjin No,25Senior High School. The instruments of the investigation are questionnaires and interviews. The investigation is composed of two parts:teachers’ situation of English emotional teaching and emotional teaching strategies in class and students’situation of English emotional teaching in class.According to the results and analysis of the investigations, the major findings revealed from the analysis of the data are as follows:1. Although most of the English teachers have the consciousness of the emotional teaching, they could not apply it well in class due to the pressure of the examination-oriented education. Besides, teachers lack a systematic knowledge of affective teaching strategies and methods so they are not able to make full use of the positive affective factors to promote teaching.2. The status of the students’ affective state is not good. Students are aware of the importance of affective teaching in learning, they aspire to be respected, encouraged and praised by teachers in class,but students’ affective needs are not satisfied very well.Based on the investigation results and data, in order to achieve the purpose of optimizing teaching and promoting students all-around development, the thesis puts forward some suggestions for teachers to implement emotional teaching in English class. They are affective strategies for the teaching content, affective strategies for the teaching evaluations, affective strategies for the teaching atmosphere and affective strategies for classroom organization. Finally, this study offers some pedagogical implications, the limitations of the present study and some suggestions for the future research.