1.2 Significance of the Study

Affective state plays a vital role in ones learning outcome. Developing students’ positive affective orientation and self-control ability is an important part in education. In second language acquisition, affective factors contain many aspects, such as motivation, self-esteem, anxiety, confidence, spirit of adventure. Nowadays, with the development of economy and technology, China has joined the World Trade Organization and foreign language learning is of great significance. In order to create effective foreign language setting, teacher talk should satisfy students’ affective need, which has changed a lot and differs from the past generation. However, as a matter of fact, teachers usually ignore students’ affective need during teaching process. For example, many students are afraid of answering questions and speaking English. Thus, this paper aims to study the relationship between teachers’ positive and student’s affect and whether teachers’ positive feedback has influence on students’ affect. 

2. Literature Review

2.1 Definition of Feedback

Many scholars have different definition towards teachers’ feedback. Allwood (1993) said that, “Very briefly, the term feedback refers to the giving or eliciting of information concerning contact，perception，understanding and attitude，by regularized linguistic means，whether or not this is done by a speaker in or out of turn”.

.Ellis(1985 P 296) gave us his understanding of feedback at the perspective of communicate, “…response to efforts by the learner to communicate. Feedback can involve such functions as corrections, acknowledgement, requests for clarification, and back channel cues such as ‘mmm’.”

Wiseman & Hunt (2001) defined the term that teacher’s feedback is to give students an oral written form of information, in order to enable students to understand the level of their learning process.

Cook (2000), a famous psychologist and linguist, defined feedback as teachers’ evaluation of the student response. Behavioral psychologists recognize that feedback influence on students’ learning motivation.

From the above definitions, we draw the conclusion that teachers’ feedback has been traditionally defined as the information the teacher provides after the students’ classroom performance to motivate and improve the students’ learning.

2.2 Definition of Positive Feedback

    Positive feedback is that to help teachers express their affirmation and appreciation towards students’ performance. It contains the oral feedback such as “Good!”, “Excellent!”, “Good idea!”, “That’s the point!”, “You did a good job!” etc. According to Zhao’s paper in 2002, “non-vocal feedback such as facial expression, eye contact, gestures, postures and so on, which has positive impact on students’ English learning”. (Zhao, 2002).文献综述

2.3 The Classification of Positive Feedback

According to the previous researches, researchers have given specific classifications to teachers’ feedback. Nunan classified feedback as positive feedback and negative feedback. Ellis classified positive feedback as facial expression and eye contact, gesture and posture, which related affective factors are non-vocal and follow-up response, simple praise, feedback with comment and so on which are vocal(Ellis, 1994).

2.4 Theoretical Basis

At first, According to Krashen’s Affective Filter Hypothesis, the effect of language learning varies from people to people, which is mainly caused by the psychological reasons. Learners differ from their learning motivation, attitude, self-confidence and other affective factors, which can form strong or weak psychological disorder. Krashen thought that the higher the motivation of students, the higher the self-confidence, the lower the anxiety, the less the filter, the better the learning effect (Stephen D. Krashen, 1981). On the country, when learners are lack of confidence and learning motivation, or they are in a low mood, the psychological barrier would be stronger and the absorption of “comprehensive input” would be less, and also the worse the effect of Second Language Acquisition. Thus, one of the most important purposes of teaching is increasing the students’ self-confidence and motivation, in order that reducing their anxiety, so that they can form their positive learning attitude and get better language learning grades.