Study on Affective Factors in College English Teaching and Learning

摘要

With the rise and development of humanistic psychology, the teaching concept of "learner centered" is being highly rewarded and respected, then foreign language teaching researchers also begin to pay close attention to the influence of affective factors in language learning. Developing "whole person" is the goal of humanistic psychology, and it advocates unifying cognition and emotion. But for a really long time, there are two misunderstandings of our English teaching. First, Chinese English educators and teachers have just paid main attentions on training students' cognitional ability but neglected the function of affective factors influenced during the teaching and learning procedure and also underestimate the effectiveness of affects played during the teaching and learning process, which ultimately leads to affective illiteracy. Second, even with the guidance of all those existing teaching theories and methodologies, the reality of Chinese English teaching and the students' practical English skills are still not satisfactory because the college English class is usually teacher-centered, text-translation and students passively followed, which finally reduces students' interests in learning English. Yet, psychological researches have already confirmed a strong dynamic affect and positive emotions such as interest; self-esteem will have a direct role in language acquisition whereas negative emotions such as anxiety, fear, tension will hinder the learning effectiveness.