A Research On Affective Factors Influencing Senior Middle School Students’ English Learning

With the continuous expansion of the English education scale in China, English plays a more and more important role in social development. Accordingly, English education has been paid much more attention. For a long time, there is still a phenomenon that in the senior middle school most English teaching only emphasizes cognitive education but neglects student’s emotional development. The function of affective factors has been ignored. It not only influences the teaching quality but also restricts the students’emotional development. Over the past few years, our country has vigorously advocated quality education to promote the student’s overall development. Emotional education also has been valued. The New Standard of English Curriculum issued by our country’s Ministry of Education lists the affective objective as one of the education goals for the first time. It affirms that "Emotional attitude is an important factor that influences the students’study and development". It also requires that teachers should not only focus on student’s cognitive development but also pay attention to cultivating student’s affective attitude in the teaching process.Based on the previous study about affective factors at home and abroad, this thesis attempts to address the following three questions:which affective factors influence students’ English learning? How do affective factors influence students’English learning? In what way can teachers help the students to enhance their positive affective factors to improve English learning? The instruments used in this research are questionnaire, interview and test. In the research process, the author used the emotional teaching method in the experimental class and the traditional teaching method in the control class. According to the data analysis, the affective factors have an important and direct influence on student’s English learning. Affective factors such as motivation, self-esteem, self-confidence, personality, and attitude and so on can promote student’s English learning. On the contrary, negative factors have bad effect. According to the results and discussion, the author combines with the actual teaching practice and offers some suggestions about how to cultivate students’ positive affective factors to improve students’ English learning in senior middle schools.