Affective Factors That Influence EFL Learners' Oral Communication: A Study Of Students In Huangshi Institute Of Technology

Foreign language teaching has witnessed a gradual shift of emphasis from teacher-dominated to learner-centered teaching model over recent years. So teaching aims at the cultivation of learners' communicative competence by means of the target language. And an important affective goal of the new model is also to promote learners' holistic personal growth. Based on this educational theory, we made a study of English major students in Huangshi Institute of Technology in an attempt to explore the influence of affective factors on their oral communication in the target language.The primary function of language is for interaction and communication. So how to improve leaners'oral communicative competence is a significant problem that each language teacher faces to solve. In China, oral English learning has been the weak point. It is of necessity to investigate factors which may obstruct or enhance oral English acquisition. A strong proponent of humanism in language teaching, Stevick (1980:4) argued that"... language learning success depends less on materials, techniques and linguistic analyses, and more on what goes on inside and between the people in the classroom", in other words, the affective factors.This paper, using questionnaire survey and quantitative analysis, intends to find out: (1) What relationships do there exist between the affective factors and oral communicative competence? What correlations are between the affective factors? (2) Which affective variables have strong prediction for college students' oral English achievement? (3) What is the affective difference between good English speakers and poor speakers? What affective characteristics can good English speakers have? Randomly-selected 103 second-year English majors in Huangshi Institute of Technology were administered the survey questionnaire on affective factors in oral communication. The questionnaire involves such 8 affective variables as motivation & attitude, self-esteem, anxiety, risk-taking, empathy, inhibition and extroversion/introversion.As English majors, nearly all the participants are highly motivated and have positive attitudes to oral English leaning, which has been proved through their questionnaires. So in the following analysis, the factors of motivation and attitude will be excluded. In the research, Correlation Coefficient Analysis was used to examine the relationship between the six affective variables (except motivation and attitude) and oral communicative competence and the interrelationship between the affective factors. Taking the results of oral English test as dependent variable, using Multiple Regression in SPSS to see if the affective variables predict the students' oral English achievement. According to their test results, good English speakers and poor English speakers were selected from the 103 students to check their affective differences in their oral communication by using T-test. Correlation Coefficient Analysis shows that: anxiety, self-esteem and inhibition are rather strongly correlated with the oral English achievement, and also there are strongly significant interrelationships between them; Risk-taking is strongly related to inhibition. Multiple Regression analysis shows that anxiety (direction opposite) has a strong prediction for the oral English achievement; T-test shows that good English speakers and poor English speakers have significant affective differences in such affective variables as anxiety, self-esteem and inhibition. And there isn't a connection between extroversion/introversion and the oral English proficiency. So good English speakers seem to have such affective characteristics as high self-esteem, a certain degree of risk-taking and empathy, and with less anxiety and inhibition.In the view of the author, the purpose of language teaching is not only to transmit content information. More importantly, we should cultivate students' positive and healthy affects and promote their development as a person. To do this, we should know that the affective side of learning is not in opposition to the cognitive...