A Correlational Study Of Vocational School Students' Affective Factors And Their Oral English Achievement

As more attention have been paid on the secondary vocational school?s education by the Chinese government and the development of itself, a growing number of the secondary vocational school?s students have more opportunities to participate in the work in a broader field. Students played various social roles, which laid the new and higher claims to the secondary vocational school teachers. Especially in today's Chinese society, since speaking English is widely requested in the workplace, it gave the secondary vocational school students who are in poor foundation of speaking English a big challenge. There are many factors that can have effect on oral English teaching and learning. Affective factor is an important one of them. With the expectation to get inspired and to look for a more scientific and reasonable way for the teaching and learning, the author tries to study from the perspective of the affective factors and to find out the answers of the following two study questions:(1) Whether there exist correlations between affective factors and the secondary vocational school students? oral English achievements.(2) If they do have correlations, how do they correlate with each other and whether they have ability to predict the oral English achievement or not?Arnold(2000), pointed out that the affective factor, from the broad sense, can be divided into four categories: self-esteem, anxiety, motivation and personality. According to Arnold?s definition and classification of affective factors, the author did the correlational research between the secondary vocational school students? oral English achievements and their four affective factors respectively. The study found that foreign language classroom anxiety has negative correlation with the secondary vocational school student's oral English achievement significantly; Motivation has the significantly positive correlation with the subjects? oral English achievements; two types of personality and self-esteem did not correlate with the oral English achievement. The study is carried out in Guangzhou Tourism and Business vocational school. 180 students(53 boys, 127 girls, aging from 16 to 17 years old) are involved in the survey.