Effects of Teacher-Student Psychological Relationship on English Learning
Abstract

With the development of globalization, English learning is becoming more and more important. People have analyzed the factors that influence English learning from both the subjective and objective aspect.  From the subjective aspect, for example, the point is whether teachers have adopted the student-centered teaching mode. From the objective aspect, for example, the point is whether the teaching content is easy, etc. However, among these factors, people tend to ignore the teacher-student psychological relationship. As a kind of emotional relationship generating from the interactions between teachers and students, it plays a significant role in English learning. So, how does the teacher-student psychological relationship influence students’ English learning? How to construct this kind of relationship? All these are worthy of studying.

This thesis employs teachers’ expectation effect theory as theoretical foundation and mainly analyzes the effects of teacher-student psychological relationship on English learning. It adopts a synthesis of these related bodies of literature and an analyzing the inspiration of the experiment called teachers’ expectation effect as research methods. Given that the relationship has both positive and negative effects, this thesis mainly focus on its positive effects. It first gives a brief introduction of teacher-student psychological relationship and its theoretical foundation -- teacher’s expectation effect. Then, it analyzes the influence of the relationship on English learning and uses teachers’ expectations as a representation, explaining the expressions of it and analyzing its special effects from the angle of cognitive component, emotional component and behavioral component --- the three components of psychological relationship respectively, and it stresses the positive influence of emotional component particularly. At last, it analyzes how to construct this kind of relationship in English learning and teaching.

The result of this thesis will be a supplement to the literature on teacher-student psychological relationship and be able to provide some reference for studying the effects of it on English learning.

Key words: teacher-student psychological relationship, teacher’s expectation effect (or Pygmalion effect), emotional component.