A Study On The Correlation Between English Classroom Environment And Students' Academic Emotions In Senior High School

Since 1930 s,Lewin' s Dynamic field theory has begun the study of classroom environment,until now,classroom environment has been a hot topic in teaching research.The research of academic emotion began with the cognitive-motivation theory put forward by Pekrun in 1992 and it made scholars realize the concept of academic emotion and its importance.The researcher of this thesis found that there are many researches about classroom environment and academic emotion by consulting the relevant literature at home and abroad,but there are few researches about the relationship between classroom environment and academic emotions,especially in senior high school.Thus this research is based on three theoretical foundations: Lewin' s Dynamic field theory,Moos' s Three dimensional theory of classroom and Pekrun' s cognitive-motivation theory.The purpose of this study is to explore what kind of classroom environment can arouse students' positive academic emotions,and this research aims to explore three questions:(1)What is the senior high school students' perception of current English classroom environment?(2)What are the characteristics of senior high school students' English academic emotions?(3)Is there any correlationbetween English classroom environment and English academic emotions?If yes,what is the correlation between the dimensions of English classroom environment and students' English academic emotions?The participants of this research are 171 senior high school students of High School Affiliated to Inner Mongolia Normal University,including two grades,Grade one and Grade two.This research applied two questionnaires and interview: Classroom Environment Inventory designed by Liu Liyan and Liu Yongbing and English Academic Emotions Questionnaire designed by Zhang Dian.All recollected questionnaires were analyzed by SPSS 20.0.Then a semi-structured interview was conducted after analyzing the data.The research results showed as follows:(1)senior high school students are satisfied with their current English classroom environment,because the mean of whole questionnaire is 137 while the full score is170.From the seven sub-dimensions,teacher support is higher than other dimensions(M=4.25),while the mean of student cohesiveness is the lowest(M=3.61);(2)At present,the senior high school students experienced more positive high arousal emotions(M=3.43),followed by positive low arousal emotions,and the least is negative low arousal emotions;(3)Pearson correlation analysis indicated that there is a medium correlation between classroom environment and academic emotions,in which there is a positive correlation with positive emotions(r=0.388)and a negative correlation with negative emotions(r=-0.415).Then,regression analysis showed that some dimensions of classroom environment have predictive effects on the four kinds of academic emotions.Then the researcher put forward some suggestions in order to create students' satisfactory English classroom environment and promote students' positive academic emotions based on the results of the study:(1)teachers not only teach students knowledge in class,but also pay attention to their emotion,if necessary,teachers should give them timely support and help;(2)when designing the classroom activities,teachers should take students' characteristics into consideration to design different activities,and it will arouse students' motivation to participate in class;(3)teachers should improve students' recognition to task,let students know the objectives of different tasks and make sure students finish tasks carefully in order to develop the right attitude to tasks.Finally the researcher discussed the limitations and prospect of this research in the future.