A Study Of Students' Affective Factors In CL Language Classroom

Human beings are emotional creatures. We are influenced by our emotions in every aspect. Long before people have showed great interest in affective factors in education, which could be evidently found in the writings of Dewey, Montessori and Vygotsky in the first part of last century. An understanding of affect in language learning is important for at least two reasons. Firstly, attention to affective aspects will lead to more effective teaching. Secondly, attention to affective aspects reaches beyond the language teaching and even beyond traditional academic realm.The thesis intends to do some research on the affective factors in CL language classroom, tries to find the relationship and correlations between them, and discusses what affective characteristics successful learners can have in CL groups. Meanwhile, the thesis gives its data analysis and involves such affective variables as motivation, attitude, self-esteem, anxiety, risk-taking, empathy, inhibition and extroversion/introversion.The main contents of the thesis are as follows: Chapter one and chapter two give a brief introduction to history of affective research from psychological perspectives, teaching approaches, linguistic perspectives. Chapter three is concerned with prior studies on affective factors that influence language learners' performance in cooperative learning and discusses the CL and its relationship with affective factors. Chapter four is a presentation of the research method and procedures of the experiment carried out in this study. Chapter five reports and discusses the results of the experiment by presenting data analysis. Chapter six provides some implications for English teaching and learning and introduces some strategies for facilitating CL. Chapter seven draws a conclusion from the research. 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 side. When both are used together, the learning process can be constructed on a firmer foundation.