Emotion And English Vocabulary Learning

Most experts are agreed that emotion is the basic need of human beings, that cognition and emotion are inseparable, and that learners' proficiency is fulfilled to the largest extent when both cognition and emotion are involved. With regard to language learning, the function of emotion in vocabulary learning has been confirmed by more and more researches in the past decades. But little has been done to study such function of emotion in vocabulary learning by Chinese learners learning English when experts, teachers and students pay more and more attention to vocabulary teaching skills and learning strategies. By experiments this paper is to explore whether emotion aroused by pictures of emotional associations will affect the English vocabulary learning of Chinese learners. In the 1st section of the experiment, recognition task was required after pictures of squares together with the target word lists for memorization were presented to subjects. In the 2nd section participants were divided into two groups before pictures of positive and negative associations were presented respectively to them with the target word lists for memorization. Our study suggested that emotion aroused by pictures of emotional associations did affect word memorization, that vocabulary memorization would be promoted by appropriate anxiety, and that a relaxed or pleasant mood would impede, or at least, would not facilitate vocabulary learning.