英语专业论文Students affective factors and teaching in favor.docx

1、英语专业论文Students affective factors and teaching in favorStudents affective factors and teaching in favorI. IntroductionTwo years ago, I taught a primary school student as a tutor. “How to make my class interesting and meaningful” I considered over and over again. At last, I decided to choose “tongue t

2、wister” as a stimuli to motivate my first pupil. And it really worked. My first pupil, is a lovely boy, he practiced it from time to time. Whenever it is the tutoring time, he rushed to ask for more tongue twisters. He said, “It is interesting to me. And I can say something that my classmates cannot

3、. I love it so much.” Then I consulted a lot of reference books, and found this deals with affective factors. Last term I had my teaching practice in a junior school, I had studied the psychology of junior students, and knew they are not reserved but active, and they are fond of learning something f

4、ull of curiosity. So I organized and designed my class with activities involving teaching in favor of delight. For example, English songs listening or English songs singing, games playing, humorous stories telling. My classes are always full of laughter.I choose junior students as my research target

5、s, because I had some contacts with them and maybe I would be familiar with their characteristics. The thesis aims to inform teachers to be aware of students affective factors in designing and organizing activities in class. And it also points out a best choice of solution-teaching in favor of delig

6、ht with relative activities and its significance and effects.II. Affective domainAs H. Douglas Brown said, affective refers to emotion or feeling. The affective domain is the emotional side of human behavior, and it may be juxtaposed to cognitive side.Motivation As H. Douglas Brown defined, motivati

7、on is commonly thought of as an inner drive, impulse, emotion, or desire that moves one to a particular action. More specifically, human beings universally have needs or drives that are more or less innate. Yet their intensity is environmentally conditioned. If they are motivated, because they think

8、 certain needs are important to them. Those who are not motivated, because they see no way in which learning meets the needs they have. While for teachers, motivation is probably the interest that something generates in the students. For example, a particular exercise, topic, songs may make the stud

9、ents appear involved in the class, to the teachers delight. Of course, obvious enjoyment by students is not necessarily a sign that learning is taking place. Motivation in this sense is a short term affair from moment to moment in the class. Vital as it is to the classroom, as yet second language ac

10、quisition research has little studied it, as Crookes and Schmidit (1991) point out. Motivation in L2 learning has, instead, chiefly been used to long term fairly stable attitudes in the students minds. In order for potentially, motivating factors of a L2 learning course actually to motivate, the lea

11、rners do of course need to be learning the L2 for some potentially motivating purpose. They need to have a goal for their learning. Lambert, in a series of experiments carried out over 30 years between the 1950s and the 1980s, has identified 2 main types of positive motivation that learners may have

12、 for learning a L2: Instrumental motivation and Integrative motivation.1. Instrumental motivation“Studying a foreign language can be important for students because it will some day be useful in getting a good job.” a statement in the Focusing Questions .Just as H. Douglas Brown stated that instrumen

13、tal motivation refers to motivation to acquire a language as means for attaining instrumental goals: to pass an exam, to read technical material, to further a career. 2. Integrative motivationVivian Cook (1996) stated “a foreign language is important to my students because they will be able to parti

14、cipate more freely in the activities of other cultural groups.” An integrative motivation is employed when learners wish to integrate themselves within the culture of the 2nd language group, to identify themselves with and become a part of that society. A survey of young people in Europe found that

15、29 percent wanted to learn more languages to increase their career possibilities, while 14 percent wanted them in order to live , work, or study in the country. The last category, 51 percent, however, were motivated by Personal interest.The survey points out that there is no single means of learning

16、 a 2nd language: some learners in some contexts are more successful in learning a language with integrative motivation, and others indifferent contexts benefit from an instrumental orientation. The finding also suggests that the 2 types of motivation are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Second la

17、nguage learning is rarely motivated by attitudes that are exclusively instrumental or exclusively integrative. Most situations involve a mixture of each type of motivation. Arabic speakers learning English in US for academic purposes may be relatively balanced in their desire to learn English both f

18、or instrumental purpose and to understand and become somewhat integrated with the culture and people of the US.L2 motivation should not therefore be considered as a forced choice between these two. Both types are important. A student might learn an L2 well with an integrative motivation or with an i

19、nstrumental one, or indeed with both, for one does not rule out the other, or with other motivation.Between the 2 different types of the motivation in English learning, only a small amount of the English-learners in our country are integratively motivated, due to their special family background and

20、their needs for going abroad. And also another small portion of them are typically instrumentally motivated. From another survey, we found easily that 80% of English learners motivation belongs to certificate motivation, which is a part of instrumental motivation.Anxiety The construct of anxiety, as

21、 it has been studied in the psychological domain, plays an important affective role in 2nd language acquisition. H. Douglas Brown said anxiety is associated with feelings of uneasiness, self-doubt, apprehension, or worry. Scovel (1978:134) defined anxiety as “a state of apprehension, a vague fear” W

22、e all know that anxiety is and we all have experienced feelings of anxiousness. How does this construct relate to 2nd language learning? Any complex task we undertake can have elements of anxiety in it, aspects in which we doubt our own abilities and wonder if we will indeed succeed. Second language

23、 learning is no exception to a long list of complex tasks that are susceptible to our human anxieties. We may be inclined to consider anxiety as an impedance to our English learning, something should be avoided at all costs. For example, we are all familiar with the feeling of “test anxiety” before

24、a big examination. However, not all anxiety is negative factor. There are deliberate and facilitate anxieties. The notion of facilitative anxiety is that some concern-some apprehension over a task to be accomplished is a positive factor. Otherwise, a learner might be inclined to be “wishy-washy”, la

25、cking that facilitative tension that keeps one poised, alert, and just slightly unbalanced to the point that one cannot relax entirely. The feeling of nervousness before giving a public speech is, inexperienced speakers, often a sign of facilitative anxiety, a symptom of just enough tension to get t

26、he job done. Consequently, it could well be that a little nervous tension in the process is a good thing. Once again, we find that a construct has an optional point along its continuum: Both too much and too little anxiety may hinder the process of successful 2nd language learning.Charateristics Cha

27、ractristics of human beings can be divided into 2 types: extrovert and introvert. 1. ExtrovertExtroverts are generally more sociable and gregarious. They enjoy change and excitement. As such, it is thought that extroverts will be more willing to use the L2 in the class and, in ESL contexts outsides

28、it, to ask and answer questions, without worrying too much about whether they make mistakes or look foolish. Especially if they are learning in the L2 environment and their language proficiency both in and outside the classroom is developing by what Krashen would regard as a natural acquisition. Ext

29、roverts will be more actively involved with the language than their introvert classmates. They will be more responsive to the input they get, be keener to try producing their own L2 utterances and so have more opportunity to build up and test hypotheses about the language structure. The result shoul

30、d be that their overall proficiency should develop more quickly and to a higher level than of their less active, because less extrovert classmates.2. IntrovertAs a contrast, introverted people, are thought of as qiet and reserved, with tendencies toward reclusiveness. They are shy,and not as active

31、as extrovert in the class. The more introverted, bookish, reserved learners, in this cotext, might however, through being willing to spend more time studying and practicing the forms of the language, develop a fuller and more accurate understanding of the language structure than the extroverts. Deta

32、ils can be seen in MyersBriggs character types.We are prone to think that the extroverts will learn English better and faster than the introverts because they are active. Also it influenced teachersperceptions of students. Sometimes introverts are thought of as not being as bright as extroverts. Such a view is misleading. Data from experiments are unclear whether extroversion or introversion helps or hinders the process of second language acquisition. Some researchers have investigated the familiar division between extrovert and introvert personalities. And Rossier (1976) found a link betwe