An Exploratory Research On Students’ Affective Factors In Their Self-directed Use Of Multimedia CD-ROM Attached To The English Textbooks

With the rapid development of computer technology and the application of CALLin college teaching, more and more multimedia teaching software emerges and isapplied extensively. Now, almost all the English textbooks used by college students areattached to a piece of multimedia CD-ROM, which can be used as the teaching tool inclassroom by English teachers as well as valuable resources for students inextracurricular learning.Chinese traditional teaching model puts much emphasis on cognitive education butneglects affective education which is as well part of education process. Long term’sneglect of affective education hinders the comprehensive and healthy development forthe college students, resulting in making many college students with high scores but lowability. With the promulgation of the English Lesson Standards (trial version) by theMinistry of Education(Wang Qiang, Cheng Xiaotang,2002), affective attitude wasprimarily listed as one of the five teaching objectives for the English lessons. TheStandards require teachers to value affective factors in the process of instruction in orderto realize the harmonious development of the students’ cognition and affect. In recentyears, even though there are more and more researches on affective education, however,these researches are confined to classroom and there are no researches on students’affective factors in their self-directed use of multimedia CD-ROM.Based on the above, the author makes an exploratory research on the status quo ofstudents’ affective factors, the correlations between the affective factors and thedifferences of the affective factors in gender and personality in the process of theirself-directed use of the multimedia CD-ROM attached to the English textbooks byanalyzing the data collected from the valid questionnaires with SPSS. The researchfindings show us:1) the students’ affective status quo in their self-directed use of themultimedia CD-ROM is good on the whole;2) any two of the three factors attitude,motivation and self-confidence are correlated positively; anxiety and inhibition arecorrelated positively; each factor of the three factors attitude, motivation andself-confidence is correlated negatively with each factor of the two factors anxiety andinhibition;3) the affective factors don’t have significant differences in gender andpersonality, which is conducive to the fair development of students’ affect in theirself-directed use of multimedia CD-ROM for English learning. Finally, this thesis provides some pedagogical suggestions based on the researchfindings in the hope that these suggestions can be accepted by college English teachersand put into teaching practice to cultivate modern college students with harmoniousdevelopment of intelligence and affect.