An Investigation Of Learners' Affective Factors In Primary School English Learning

In the past decades, affect becomes one of the most important concerns in the curriculum reformationof English education. In the English New Curriculum Standards pressed by the Ministry of Education in2001, affect is required as one of the most important teaching contents and goals. Therefore the teachersshould pay attention to affect teaching and to meet the requirements of quality-oriented education andstudents' all-around development.This thesis mainly investigated the young English learners' four main affective factors: motivation,attitude, anxiety and personality. Motivation is a complex series of variables including effort and desire toachieve goals, and attitudes towards learning language. It has been almost accepted by all the teachers,educators and researchers as one of the vital factors that influence the learners' final achievement languagelearning. Attitude which refers to the mental and neural state of readiness is organized through experienceand exert a decisive or dynamic influence on the individual's response to all subjects and situations related.Learners' different attitudes lead to very different learning methods. Successful learners are easily toacquire positive attitudes to learn their target language. Anxiety is defined as a subjective feeling of tension,apprehension, nervousness and worry related with an autonomic nervous system. The students' personalityinfluences learners' language learning greatly as well. Therefore teachers should encourage their students tobe confident, active, outgoing and sociable and try to guide their students to adapt themselves to differentlearning situations and learning tasks.The aim of this thesis is to investigate the current elementary students' affective factors of Englishlearning in primary school, to promote young students' English learning, and meanwhile to awakenteachers' affective awareness and improve their teaching qualities. To better understand the current situationof elementary school students' affect in English learning as well as the effect of affective factors in Englishlearning, the author investigates students in Zhengda Bilingual in Xinxiang City, Henan province to make aquestionnaire survey.According to the results of the investigation, the author finds that the subjects mostly have obviouslearning motivation. With motivation, young learners are very interested in learning English, including the culture and the customs of the English speaking countries. Secondly, most of the subjects have a positiveattitude. They can finish what their teacher required and complete the assignment or homework timely andactively. They are willing to learn the language and realize the differences between English and Chinese.Thirdly, there exists high anxiety in the current young English classes. The subjects' anxieties are mainlybecause of communicating anxiety in English in public and anxiety of tests. Fourthly, for personality, mostof the young learners have strong self-esteem in English learning, which can help them succeed in Englishlanguage learning. While those who are not confident in themselves usually choose to avoid or even giveup the opportunity to learn English in classroom, not to say after class or in their home. According to thesurvey results, it is obvious that how to motivate the students, how to make right attitude, how to reducetheir anxiety and how to cultivate students' personality to adapt themselves to different learningenvironments and learning tasks will be important in English learning.