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[Abstract] The article mainly discusses the importance of affective factors in college English reading teaching and gives some suggestions on how to cultivate students’ positive affective factors.
[Key words] College English Reading Teaching；emotional factors；anxiety；attitude；motivation
1.Introduction
Nowadays, English reading has become more and more important. Reading is one of the important means to get knowledge and understand the world around us. However, do well in reading is not an easy thing, students have a general feeling like this: if for Chinese articles, they can read these passages for several hours, and they can get the main idea of the articles, and they don’t feel tired. In contrast, if for English passages, they will spend more time in reading them even if these passages have few new words. What’s worse, they not only feel tired easily, but they can’t concentrate their energy on reading. Why does this phenomenon happen? There are many factors for it, such as too many new words, slang, allusions, and so on. With the rising and development of humanistic psychology, people paid more and more attention to the emotional problems in language teaching. Psychology humanism thinks the goal of education is to promote person’s comprehensive development, and in order to achieve this goal, we must put language learning and emotional factors together. However, people put too much emphasis on the brain’s rational and cognitive function, but ignore the irrational aspects of emotional factors development, which cause emotion empty illiteracy. This tendency is overemphasized language learning cognitive factors but ignored the significance of emotion, which is the main reason of the low in current university students’ reading ability.
Understanding the importance of emotional factors and learning to apply positive emotional factors is the best way to do well in the college English reading. College teachers may know how to use this good method and help the students to adjust their emotion in reading. And students may improve the ability effectively and show more interest in English reading.
2.Emotional Factors in College English Reading Teaching
2.1 Anxiety
Anxiety is one of the important factors. Anxiety makes students’ self-respect and self-confidence suffered a severe setback because the individual can not achieve the object or can not overcome the anticipating barrier. Many people usually think that anxiety is unfavorable for language learning. For example, students may become anxiety in class if they are required to answer the questions, and anxiety makes students become worried. Due to the influence of distraction, students’ learning ability will decline, thus, negative self－assessment, and even self－abased will appear. And this cognition can make a great further influence on learning ability. For some students, they will become anxious on learning a language and using a language to communicate once they are affected by this anxiety. Students might create anxiety when they use a foreign language to accept information. For example, anxious students may worry that they don’t understand the language structure and how to guess the meaning from the context, they are afraid of making mistakes which may cause them feel embarrassment. Macintyre & Gardner’s (1994) concluded that some of the anxiety on specific learning process will accumulate more and more, eventually these anxieties will cause a gap between more anxiety students and more relaxed students. Is anxiety really a natural enemy for language learners? As Scovel has said in 2001, language learning anxiety can play a positive role in the classroom. He notes that this view about anxiety is the language learners’ enemy is not reasonable, inaccurate and untenable. Macintyre (2002) claimed that anxiety can lead to bad language expression. In class if the students’ language learning anxiety is eliminated by the teacher, their language performance will be better. He also pointed out that anxiety will affect students’ language learning motivation which directly affects the students’ learning effort. For example, students will actively raise his hand to answer questions in the class, and often speak more, they will get a better language grade.
2.2 Attitude
Gagne thinks that attitude is a kind of behavior and a ready reaction situation, but it is not the actual response itself which can affect the behavior. Therefore, the attitude mainly has a great influence on the choice tendency of individual behavior that whether a learner willing to finish a study task. Gardner’s (1985) argues that, attitude and learning objective, the degree of learning hard and the desire of getting purpose, make up a second language learning motivation. In this section, this thesis discusses the attitude between the students and the teachers have a great impact in college English reading teaching. The students’ learning attitude includes attitude on study, study materials, teachers, and school. Learning attitude plays an important role in learning effect. Factors can decide a learner’s attitude. For example, if a student prefers a male teacher teaching, so teachers’ sex becomes the student’ a positive attitude objects. By contrast, if a student holds indifferent attitude to a teacher, he will have no expression in the teacher teaching. That is to say, a teacher whether is a male or a female, he or she will not have any impact on the students’ learning. And the teacher’s attitude includes career attitude, attitude on students and school, character. If a teacher loves his own career, treats his students equally, has a contribution spirit and an optimistic attitude, then his lesson will be very successful, he will be also very popular among students, in contrast, student will not enjoy his classes, the quality of teaching will fall.
Anyhow, students’ attitude and the teacher’s attitude put an effect on college English reading teaching, positive attitude can improve students learning process, enhance the teacher prestige, and improve teaching level. By contrast, negative attitude will cause the student performance decline, the teacher has no prestige, and the teaching quality is low. 2.3 Motivation
According to the theory of the independent, motivation can be divided into external motivation and inner motivation actually, the external motivation means the learning motivation which produce under the influence of outside incentive and demand. “Wanting me to learn” is an example of the external motivation. And internal learning motivation is a kind of learning request in learning activities. “I want to learn” is an example of the internal motivation. At home and abroad, there are many researching results about the internal motivation for learning. Learning motivation contains a variety of psychological factors which promote learning by analyzing the perspective of systematic. Bruna, American education psychologist, thinks that inner motivation is learning activity target. Chinese scholars think that students’ learning motivation is mainly controlled by the communication motivation, achievement motivation, and desire motivation. The desire motivation for knowledge aims at getting knowledge which it points out the study task itself, and acquiring knowledge can get the maximum satisfy. The influence of students’ internal motivation is more directly, durable, and more active. The inner motivation can guide the students to the curious and desire for knowledge, improve their confidence. It is one of the important goals that teachers want to achieve.
3.Approaches to Develop Positive Emotion in College English Reading Teaching
The problems of anxiety, negative attitude and motivation have a great influence in English reading learning activities. In order to solve the problems existing in the implementation of emotional factors, some suggestions are provided as follows.
3.1 Unity of Cognition and Emotion to lower anxiety
The phenomenon that our teachers enlighten knowledge but ignore emotion generally exists in the current school education. How to change this phenomenon? How to make the cognition and emotion apply correctly in English reading teaching classroom? In order to achieve this goal, first of all, the teacher must change their concepts, strengthen the consciousness of emotional factors which have a great effect on language learning, which should be good to students with sincere, accepting and understanding attitude. The humanistic learning concepts focus on the individual feeling, beliefs and intention. It points out that the function of studying in learning situation should take students as the center and directional process. Learning should include the acquirement of new information and personalization information. Thus, I believe that in the student-centered of teaching, teachers should encourage students to read positively and make reasonable guess. There are many methods for positive reading, such as to read the article with continually asking questions, link the reading articles with existing knowledge, activate the original schema, think about the meaning of the passages positively, use their own language to express their thoughts.. Accordingly, in the college English reading teaching, we should encourage students to begin to make expecting, such as forecasting what to speak next, expecting the behavior of the characters, guessing the causal sequence of articles events, inferring the motive characters positively, looking for evidence or adjust their expectations. Surely, this kind of reading teaching is deeply welcomed by college students. 3.2 Setting up Positive Attitude in Teaching and Learning
In current teaching model, teacher is the centre in the class and just to impart knowledge and ignore the students’ emotion. Students are in a passive position and feel the class boring. Whether Students are subject and study centre depends on their attitude. How to change this teaching situation? There are two ways. First, the teacher not only prepares his lessons carefully and teaches well, but also pays attention to their own emotion and students’ emotion. This requires the teacher to overcome their own negative emotion, pay attention to the students’ emotion, encourage and help them solve anxiety problems, improve their reading interest. By this way, students will become the centre of classroom, change attitudes from I am learned become I want to learn. Secondly, the students should also change their attitude. That is to say, students should set up a positive study attitude: try to speak and answer questions more and more in class, talk with our teachers as friends, help our classmates as our sisters or brothers. By this way, they can become more active, friendlier and more confidence in class.
3.3 Stimulating Students’ Study Motivation
In the English teaching process, the student should be the main study body and the teacher the guider. During the students’ learning process, students’ learning motivation is the core. Training and stimulating the students’ learning motivation are an important task for teachers. Here are three ways to stimulate students’ learning motivation. Firstly, to enhance students’ learning interest, stimulate students’ learning motivation. If you want to move someone’s heart, sentiment should be first. Therefore, the teachers should treat students friendly, love them and help them to solve the difficulties in study and life enthusiastically. Then students will treat teacher as their friend and will naturally love the subject. Secondly, Interest is the understanding tendency with emotional coloring. In the study, if students are successful, they will be very happy. In reading try to help students understand the academic development, evolution and function by telling the subject stories. By this way, not only the students have great interest in English reading teaching, but they can also get knowledge and having a sense of success. And then students will have a certain interest in learning. Finally, teachers can develop a properly competition, improve the students’ enthusiasm. Developing a properly competition is an effective means to inspire the students’ learning enthusiasm and help them get excellent result. By competition, the students can have a strong interest and desire for knowledge, and they greatly strengthen the perseverance to overcome difficulties, so in class, especially in activity class, teachers should generally take the form of competition to organize teaching. 4.Conclusion
From the thesis, we have generally known that English reading teaching is not only a cognitive process, but it is an emotion process. Emotion can have great influence on college English reading, and it can change the role of teachers and students. It places college students in the central position in teaching-learning process and teacher as a guide. Besides, it changes the situation that emotion isolated from college English reading teaching. Emotion is very important for learning knowledge. However, the negative emotion more or less hinders the teaching process in college English reading, while positive emotion could arouse students’ interest and let them work in a group. Emotion can change the tedious class into a positive one. With the help of the teacher, students can find more interest to learn college English reading, they could learn more relaxed by cooperation. In conclusion, emotional factors help students and teachers to establish a healthy and harmonious interpersonal relationship.
References:
[1] 郭李琴. 谈情感因素与大学英语阅读教学[J]人文社科，2007.
[2] 田纯广. 情感因素与大学英语教学[J].教育教学研究，2007（23）.
[3] 宋淑媛. 情感因素在英语教学中的渗透[J].职业技术教育，2009 (35).
[4] 项茂英. 情感因素对大学英语教学的影响[J].外语与外语教学2003（3）
[5] 葛广纯,周玉梅，周训贞. English reading course.[M]第四军医大学出版社，2003
[6] 王银泉，万玉书.外语学习焦虑及其对外语学习的影响[J].外语教学与研究，2001(33).
[7] 陈鹏. 大学生心理健康概论.[M]北京大学出版社，2008.
[8] 曹树真. 论罗杰斯的师生观[J].外国教育研究，2000(27).
[9] 王初明. 影响外语学习的两大因素与外语教学[J].外语界，2001（6）
[10] 崔洁. 谈情感因素在英语教学中的作用[J].安徽卫生职业技术学院学报，2006（5）.
[11] 李洁.情感因素与大学生英语阅读研究，Retrieved April23,2011,from http://lw.china-b.com/jyys/20090225/384458_1.html#，2009.
[12] 郭书彩.外语课堂合作学习中的情感与认知因素[J].国外外语教学，2007.
[13] 郭红霞. 外语学习焦虑研究及其意义外语学习焦虑研究及其意义. Retrieved April23,2011, http://www.szrtvu.com.cn/n318c79.aspx
[14] 赵思雅.焦虑在大学生英语学习中的影响， Retrieved April23,2011,from http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5e45cf980100eb80.html，2009.
[15] 张洋娇.合作学习在初中英语阅读教学中的运用与思考[J].中国教育与社会科RetrievedApril23,2011,http://www.chinaqking.com/%D4%AD%B4%B4%D7%F7%C6%B7/2009/52797.html，2009.
[16]于化娟.如何激發学生的学习动机， Retrieved April23,2011, http://www.teacherclub.com.cn/tresearch/a/1801237458cid00001，2010.
作者简介：
周明霞（1978-），女（壮族），广西上思人，河池学院外语系讲师，主要研究方向为英语教学。
[Key words] College English Reading Teaching；emotional factors；anxiety；attitude；motivation
1.Introduction
Nowadays, English reading has become more and more important. Reading is one of the important means to get knowledge and understand the world around us. However, do well in reading is not an easy thing, students have a general feeling like this: if for Chinese articles, they can read these passages for several hours, and they can get the main idea of the articles, and they don’t feel tired. In contrast, if for English passages, they will spend more time in reading them even if these passages have few new words. What’s worse, they not only feel tired easily, but they can’t concentrate their energy on reading. Why does this phenomenon happen? There are many factors for it, such as too many new words, slang, allusions, and so on. With the rising and development of humanistic psychology, people paid more and more attention to the emotional problems in language teaching. Psychology humanism thinks the goal of education is to promote person’s comprehensive development, and in order to achieve this goal, we must put language learning and emotional factors together. However, people put too much emphasis on the brain’s rational and cognitive function, but ignore the irrational aspects of emotional factors development, which cause emotion empty illiteracy. This tendency is overemphasized language learning cognitive factors but ignored the significance of emotion, which is the main reason of the low in current university students’ reading ability.
Understanding the importance of emotional factors and learning to apply positive emotional factors is the best way to do well in the college English reading. College teachers may know how to use this good method and help the students to adjust their emotion in reading. And students may improve the ability effectively and show more interest in English reading.
2.Emotional Factors in College English Reading Teaching
2.1 Anxiety
Anxiety is one of the important factors. Anxiety makes students’ self-respect and self-confidence suffered a severe setback because the individual can not achieve the object or can not overcome the anticipating barrier. Many people usually think that anxiety is unfavorable for language learning. For example, students may become anxiety in class if they are required to answer the questions, and anxiety makes students become worried. Due to the influence of distraction, students’ learning ability will decline, thus, negative self－assessment, and even self－abased will appear. And this cognition can make a great further influence on learning ability. For some students, they will become anxious on learning a language and using a language to communicate once they are affected by this anxiety. Students might create anxiety when they use a foreign language to accept information. For example, anxious students may worry that they don’t understand the language structure and how to guess the meaning from the context, they are afraid of making mistakes which may cause them feel embarrassment. Macintyre & Gardner’s (1994) concluded that some of the anxiety on specific learning process will accumulate more and more, eventually these anxieties will cause a gap between more anxiety students and more relaxed students. Is anxiety really a natural enemy for language learners? As Scovel has said in 2001, language learning anxiety can play a positive role in the classroom. He notes that this view about anxiety is the language learners’ enemy is not reasonable, inaccurate and untenable. Macintyre (2002) claimed that anxiety can lead to bad language expression. In class if the students’ language learning anxiety is eliminated by the teacher, their language performance will be better. He also pointed out that anxiety will affect students’ language learning motivation which directly affects the students’ learning effort. For example, students will actively raise his hand to answer questions in the class, and often speak more, they will get a better language grade.
2.2 Attitude
Gagne thinks that attitude is a kind of behavior and a ready reaction situation, but it is not the actual response itself which can affect the behavior. Therefore, the attitude mainly has a great influence on the choice tendency of individual behavior that whether a learner willing to finish a study task. Gardner’s (1985) argues that, attitude and learning objective, the degree of learning hard and the desire of getting purpose, make up a second language learning motivation. In this section, this thesis discusses the attitude between the students and the teachers have a great impact in college English reading teaching. The students’ learning attitude includes attitude on study, study materials, teachers, and school. Learning attitude plays an important role in learning effect. Factors can decide a learner’s attitude. For example, if a student prefers a male teacher teaching, so teachers’ sex becomes the student’ a positive attitude objects. By contrast, if a student holds indifferent attitude to a teacher, he will have no expression in the teacher teaching. That is to say, a teacher whether is a male or a female, he or she will not have any impact on the students’ learning. And the teacher’s attitude includes career attitude, attitude on students and school, character. If a teacher loves his own career, treats his students equally, has a contribution spirit and an optimistic attitude, then his lesson will be very successful, he will be also very popular among students, in contrast, student will not enjoy his classes, the quality of teaching will fall.
Anyhow, students’ attitude and the teacher’s attitude put an effect on college English reading teaching, positive attitude can improve students learning process, enhance the teacher prestige, and improve teaching level. By contrast, negative attitude will cause the student performance decline, the teacher has no prestige, and the teaching quality is low. 2.3 Motivation
According to the theory of the independent, motivation can be divided into external motivation and inner motivation actually, the external motivation means the learning motivation which produce under the influence of outside incentive and demand. “Wanting me to learn” is an example of the external motivation. And internal learning motivation is a kind of learning request in learning activities. “I want to learn” is an example of the internal motivation. At home and abroad, there are many researching results about the internal motivation for learning. Learning motivation contains a variety of psychological factors which promote learning by analyzing the perspective of systematic. Bruna, American education psychologist, thinks that inner motivation is learning activity target. Chinese scholars think that students’ learning motivation is mainly controlled by the communication motivation, achievement motivation, and desire motivation. The desire motivation for knowledge aims at getting knowledge which it points out the study task itself, and acquiring knowledge can get the maximum satisfy. The influence of students’ internal motivation is more directly, durable, and more active. The inner motivation can guide the students to the curious and desire for knowledge, improve their confidence. It is one of the important goals that teachers want to achieve.
3.Approaches to Develop Positive Emotion in College English Reading Teaching
The problems of anxiety, negative attitude and motivation have a great influence in English reading learning activities. In order to solve the problems existing in the implementation of emotional factors, some suggestions are provided as follows.
3.1 Unity of Cognition and Emotion to lower anxiety
The phenomenon that our teachers enlighten knowledge but ignore emotion generally exists in the current school education. How to change this phenomenon? How to make the cognition and emotion apply correctly in English reading teaching classroom? In order to achieve this goal, first of all, the teacher must change their concepts, strengthen the consciousness of emotional factors which have a great effect on language learning, which should be good to students with sincere, accepting and understanding attitude. The humanistic learning concepts focus on the individual feeling, beliefs and intention. It points out that the function of studying in learning situation should take students as the center and directional process. Learning should include the acquirement of new information and personalization information. Thus, I believe that in the student-centered of teaching, teachers should encourage students to read positively and make reasonable guess. There are many methods for positive reading, such as to read the article with continually asking questions, link the reading articles with existing knowledge, activate the original schema, think about the meaning of the passages positively, use their own language to express their thoughts.. Accordingly, in the college English reading teaching, we should encourage students to begin to make expecting, such as forecasting what to speak next, expecting the behavior of the characters, guessing the causal sequence of articles events, inferring the motive characters positively, looking for evidence or adjust their expectations. Surely, this kind of reading teaching is deeply welcomed by college students. 3.2 Setting up Positive Attitude in Teaching and Learning
In current teaching model, teacher is the centre in the class and just to impart knowledge and ignore the students’ emotion. Students are in a passive position and feel the class boring. Whether Students are subject and study centre depends on their attitude. How to change this teaching situation? There are two ways. First, the teacher not only prepares his lessons carefully and teaches well, but also pays attention to their own emotion and students’ emotion. This requires the teacher to overcome their own negative emotion, pay attention to the students’ emotion, encourage and help them solve anxiety problems, improve their reading interest. By this way, students will become the centre of classroom, change attitudes from I am learned become I want to learn. Secondly, the students should also change their attitude. That is to say, students should set up a positive study attitude: try to speak and answer questions more and more in class, talk with our teachers as friends, help our classmates as our sisters or brothers. By this way, they can become more active, friendlier and more confidence in class.
3.3 Stimulating Students’ Study Motivation
In the English teaching process, the student should be the main study body and the teacher the guider. During the students’ learning process, students’ learning motivation is the core. Training and stimulating the students’ learning motivation are an important task for teachers. Here are three ways to stimulate students’ learning motivation. Firstly, to enhance students’ learning interest, stimulate students’ learning motivation. If you want to move someone’s heart, sentiment should be first. Therefore, the teachers should treat students friendly, love them and help them to solve the difficulties in study and life enthusiastically. Then students will treat teacher as their friend and will naturally love the subject. Secondly, Interest is the understanding tendency with emotional coloring. In the study, if students are successful, they will be very happy. In reading try to help students understand the academic development, evolution and function by telling the subject stories. By this way, not only the students have great interest in English reading teaching, but they can also get knowledge and having a sense of success. And then students will have a certain interest in learning. Finally, teachers can develop a properly competition, improve the students’ enthusiasm. Developing a properly competition is an effective means to inspire the students’ learning enthusiasm and help them get excellent result. By competition, the students can have a strong interest and desire for knowledge, and they greatly strengthen the perseverance to overcome difficulties, so in class, especially in activity class, teachers should generally take the form of competition to organize teaching. 4.Conclusion
From the thesis, we have generally known that English reading teaching is not only a cognitive process, but it is an emotion process. Emotion can have great influence on college English reading, and it can change the role of teachers and students. It places college students in the central position in teaching-learning process and teacher as a guide. Besides, it changes the situation that emotion isolated from college English reading teaching. Emotion is very important for learning knowledge. However, the negative emotion more or less hinders the teaching process in college English reading, while positive emotion could arouse students’ interest and let them work in a group. Emotion can change the tedious class into a positive one. With the help of the teacher, students can find more interest to learn college English reading, they could learn more relaxed by cooperation. In conclusion, emotional factors help students and teachers to establish a healthy and harmonious interpersonal relationship.
References:
[1] 郭李琴. 谈情感因素与大学英语阅读教学[J]人文社科，2007.
[2] 田纯广. 情感因素与大学英语教学[J].教育教学研究，2007（23）.
[3] 宋淑媛. 情感因素在英语教学中的渗透[J].职业技术教育，2009 (35).
[4] 项茂英. 情感因素对大学英语教学的影响[J].外语与外语教学2003（3）
[5] 葛广纯,周玉梅，周训贞. English reading course.[M]第四军医大学出版社，2003
[6] 王银泉，万玉书.外语学习焦虑及其对外语学习的影响[J].外语教学与研究，2001(33).
[7] 陈鹏. 大学生心理健康概论.[M]北京大学出版社，2008.
[8] 曹树真. 论罗杰斯的师生观[J].外国教育研究，2000(27).
[9] 王初明. 影响外语学习的两大因素与外语教学[J].外语界，2001（6）
[10] 崔洁. 谈情感因素在英语教学中的作用[J].安徽卫生职业技术学院学报，2006（5）.
[11] 李洁.情感因素与大学生英语阅读研究，Retrieved April23,2011,from http://lw.china-b.com/jyys/20090225/384458_1.html#，2009.
[12] 郭书彩.外语课堂合作学习中的情感与认知因素[J].国外外语教学，2007.
[13] 郭红霞. 外语学习焦虑研究及其意义外语学习焦虑研究及其意义. Retrieved April23,2011, http://www.szrtvu.com.cn/n318c79.aspx
[14] 赵思雅.焦虑在大学生英语学习中的影响， Retrieved April23,2011,from http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5e45cf980100eb80.html，2009.
[15] 张洋娇.合作学习在初中英语阅读教学中的运用与思考[J].中国教育与社会科RetrievedApril23,2011,http://www.chinaqking.com/%D4%AD%B4%B4%D7%F7%C6%B7/2009/52797.html，2009.
[16]于化娟.如何激發学生的学习动机， Retrieved April23,2011, http://www.teacherclub.com.cn/tresearch/a/1801237458cid00001，2010.
作者简介：
周明霞（1978-），女（壮族），广西上思人，河池学院外语系讲师，主要研究方向为英语教学。