An Empirical Study Of The Influence Of Affective Teaching Strategies On College Students’ English Reading

The affective filter hypothesis is put forward by American linguist Krashen in1982 to explore the influence of affective factors on second language acquisition.This hypothesis points out that affective filtering has an important effect on language input.It is found that learners’ motivation,self-confidence and anxiety all affect the effect of affective filtering.Researchers at home and abroad have done a lot of research on this hypothesis in oral English and English vocabulary.The results show that affective factors play an important role in second language acquisition.Based on Krashen’s affective filter hypothesis and a large number of related literature,this study explores the effects of affective teaching strategies on college English reading.By using the methods of literature research,questionnaire and interview,a set of affective teaching strategies is constructed,and a semester of teaching experiment is carried out.The purpose of this study is to answer three questions: 1)what are the main causes of college students’ English reading anxiety?2)What is the relationship between students’ reading anxiety and their English reading performance? 3)What affective strategies teachers can adopt to improve students’ reading performance?In this study,84 freshmen from two non-English major classes of Shenyang Normal University in 2019 are divided into experimental class and control class.The students in the two classes have similar English level.In this experiment,the experimental class adopts the affective teaching strategy to assist reading teaching,while the control class still uses the traditional English reading model during the process of teaching.The experiment selects the same teaching materials and teacher to carry on the experiment teaching in a semester.After a semester of teaching experiments and analysis of the data by SPSS,the following conclusions are reached: 1)the main reasons affect college students’ English reading anxiety are: the anxiety causes by the difficulty in text comprehension,emotional factors and improper reading methods.2)There is a significant negative correlation between students’ reading anxiety and their English reading performance.In general,the higher the anxiety level is,the worse the reading performance will be.Therefore,it is very important to integrate the affective teaching into the daily English reading teaching to help them to reduce their anxiety.3)Combining students’ situation of reading anxiety and the experiment,this study has formulated six strategies to reduce students’ anxiety in English reading.Namely,cognitive guidance strategy,form matching strategy,raising expectations strategy,multi-evaluation strategy,affective retention strategy and affective connection strategy.After a semester of teaching experiment,through the comparison of students’ reading performance and anxiety scores,we find that affective teaching strategy plays a significant positive role in reducing students’ reading anxiety and improving their reading performance.Therefore,in the future college English reading teaching,teachers should pay more attention to students’ negative emotional changes and actively use affective teaching strategies to help students reduce their anxiety and other emotional problems.At the same time,teachers should establish a good teacher-student relationship with students so that they can deal with the difficulties in English reading with a more positive and happy attitude,and strengthen students’ self-confidence and courage in English learning.