A Survey Of Affective English Teaching In Higher Vocational Colleges

Affective Teaching has a long history, and researches show that there is a very close relation between learners' affect and language learning. Taking care of students' affect and utilizing Affect Teaching properly can not only facilitate their language learning, but also benefit students' all-round development. However, in current English teaching in Higher Vocational colleges, teachers usually pay more attention to students' cognitive factors and language knowledge while neglecting their affect which makes students learn English passively. Due to the particularity of teaching in Higher Vocational Colleges, students need more affective attention from teachers. In recent years, the investigation into Affective Teaching mainly focused on the situation in middle schools and universities, while little has been devoted to English teaching in Higher Vocational Colleges.Survey belongs to the empirical research which is a necessary diagnostic process for the improvement and implementation of teaching. In order to solve the problems exsiting in teaching, it is important to investigate the problems first. And the final purpose of the survey is to improve teaching effect and quality. This study investigated the implementation of Affective English Teaching pointing out the problems existing in English teaching in Higher Vocational Colleges in order to provide practical basis and guidelines for improving the quality of English teaching.Teaching is a two-way communitcation between teachers and students. If we want to know how teaching process carries out and how the teaching effect is, not only do we have to investigate teachers, but also to get feetback from students. There are 45 English teachers and 184 students from Shandong Institute of Commerce and Technology involved in this study. First, they completed questionaires and then 6 teachers and 8 students were interviewed. The data was analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively.Findings of the study reveal that although both English teachers and students are aware of the necessity and importance of Affective Teaching, teachers are found to attach too much importance to cognitive aspect of English learning in their teaching practices, thus neglecting the roles of affective factos. Teachers are also found to fail to effectively respond to students' negative affective factors such as sense of inferiority, anxiety, inhibition, etc. in their teaching practices due to lack of relevant theories and methodologies which are found to have negatively influenced the students' English learning. The absence of teacher-student communication also contributes to the non-implementation of Affective Teaching. In addition, the study also finds that the student-centered teaching mode is not popular with students. Most of the students prefer the teaching mode of “the combination of students participation and the guidance of teachers”.Finally, on the basis of the research findings, this study provides some pedagogical implications and points out the limitations of the present study and the expectations for the future research.The significance of this survey is shown in three aspects. First, paying attention to affects is beneficial to improve the teaching and learning effect. Negative emotions affect the learning potential whereas positive emotions are very conductive to language learning. To cultivate students' positive emotions, reduce or eliminate the impacts of negative emotions is helpful to improve the quality of teaching and effect. Second, it is helpful to promote the all-round development of students to solve emotional problems. Traditional teaching pays more attention to the cognitive factors while neglecting students' personality and ability. Third, Affective Teaching is conducive to the cultivate students' subjective consciousness and the creative spirit of teachers. Affective Teaching advocates “student-centred learning”, paying attention to the student's active participation. This kind of teaching mode can exert students' subjective initiative and train teachers' ability to organize and control the class.This study is a case study, and it does reflect some problems existing in current English Teaching, and is of the status quo of Affective Teaching in Higher Vocational Colleges. Even so, while considering cognitive factors in teaching, it is important for teachers to exert the role of affective factors, appropriately adopt Affective Teaching and focus on all-round development of students.