An Experimental Study On Positive Affect In Junior Middle School English Vocabulary Teaching

Affect attitude is an important factor for English learners and it is also one of the teaching objectives of English. With the balanced development of basic education,affect factors in education teaching are receiving more attention from many researchers.Affect began to be explored in educational theory fields in China from the end of the twentieth century. The theory of affect education was expressly proposed and raised resonance in teaching practice. However, at present, our country’s emphasis on affect education in English teaching at middle schools is not enough. With reference to middle school English teaching and researches in recent years, the author found that papers on the research of affect aspect are rare. Some papers and articles related to affect researches mainly focus on the student’s own strategies and rarely related to the role of affect factors in vocabulary teaching in junior middle schools. Vocabulary learning is the foundation of English learning.However, teachers always teach students with high strength of knowledge repetition and high density of time, These cause students mental fatigue and frustration that due to ineffective memorization of vocabulary.In view of this, this research combines positive psychology, affect filter hypothesis during language acquisition and Maslow s hierarchy of need, aiming to explore the role of positive affect in English vocabulary teaching in junior middle school so as to increase the effect of English vocabulary learning and improve student s English level.The following questions can be answered in this paper:1. Can vocabulary teaching with positive affect arouse the students interest to study English?2. Can vocabulary teaching with positive affect enhance the students memory of vocabulary?3. Can vocabulary teaching with positive affect influence students English learning achievements?During the experimental research, the author uses two questionnaires and three tests combining interview as research instruments to carry out the study.There are ninety students in total as participants in this study who were taught by the author. 43 students are considered as an experimental group, the other 47 students are regarded as a controlled group. The experimental class is taught with positive affect in English vocabulary teaching while the controlled class is taught in a traditional method. The controlled class and the experimental class involved in three tests and questionnaires at the same time before the experiment. After the experiment, the experimental class took part in questionnaires and interview. The author adopted SPSS(Statistical Package for Social Sciences) version 10.0 to process and analyze percentile data according to experiment results. The result shows:1. Vocabulary teaching with positive affect can arouse the students interest to study English2. Vocabulary teaching with positive affect can enhance the students memory of vocabulary.3.Vocabulary teaching with positive affect can influence students English learning achievements.The experiment results show that the application of positive affect in junior middle school English vocabulary teaching plays an active role which will be a strong indication that positive affect is effective and entirely feasible. The experiment provides some empirical material for junior middle school English vocabulary teaching.