An Empirical Study Of Mind Map-based Junior High Spoken English Classroom Activity Design

With the continuous development of economic globalization,English talents are increasingly needed in modern society and English plays a more important role in many fields.People also pay more attention to the cultivation of English learners’ spoken and communicative competence.In recent years,English education of junior high school in our country has made great progress,while there are still many problems.For example,students are generally not interested in spoken English learning,lack learning motivation and effective learning methods.Teachers focus more on vocabulary and grammar because of exam policies,but ignore the importance of spoken English and lack effective spoken English teaching strategies and design.It must be bad for junior high school students to learn spoken English for long term.For front-line teachers,the subject----how to design attractive English classroom activities is still worth exploring.Therefore,the author attempts to explore an effective way of spoken English activity design in junior high school during the internship.Tony Buzan,a well-known British psychologist,presented the definition of mind mapping in the 1960 s.He regards mind mapping as a kind of knowledge diagram method or a visual knowledge representation tool.By reading related studies,the author realizes that specialists and experts at home and aboard concentrate more on the effect of mind mapping in grammar,reading and writing and research results have been widely used in teaching practice.However,few people study mind mapping in spoken English teaching.Inspired by mind mapping,the author tries to explore the effect and verify the practicality of mind map-based spoken English classroom activity design in junior high school.Research questions are proposed as follows:(1)By taking use of mind mapping in spoken English classroom activity design,how can junior high school students improve their interest in English speaking?(2)What are the effects of mind mapping to enrich students’ spoken English learning strategies in learning spoken English?(3)What are the roles of mind mapping to enrich teachers’ spoken English teaching strategies in designing spoken English classroom activity?Based on Tony Buzan’s theory,Krashen’s Input Hypothesis Theory,Brain Science Theory,Knowledge Visualization Theory and Radiant Thinking Theory,the research explores mind map-based junior high spoken English classroom activity design,which lays the foundation for the connection between mind mapping and spoken English.The author has made a survey on current situation of spoken English activities in junior high school and found the status is not optimistic.As a visualized tool,mind mapping can be connected with spoken English to change mechanical learning current and boring ways of spoken English learning.When colorful mind mapping is used to support spoken English learning,students’ interest in spoken English is increasing naturally.Mind mapping not only enriches the methods for students to learn spoken English,but also enriches the design strategies for teachers’ spoken English classes.Therefore,according to the characteristics of mind mapping,four steps of classroom activities are designed by the author: lead-in,construction of spoken English mind map by teacher-students interaction,construction of spoken English mind mapping by students’ group,sharing of learning experience.Based on those steps,the author has implemented activities actively and analyzed selected cases.This study adopts the methods of questionnaire and interview,taking 43 students and three teachers of Class One,Grade Seven in Changchun Experimental Junior High School as research subjects.Questionnaires and interviews are carried on for students and the data are analyzed by the author with the tool of Excel to know students’ actual feeling about using mind mapping in spoken English learning.The author interviews teachers as well to know the effect of these activities and teachers’ real feelings of using mind mapping.Based on the research mentioned above,three main conclusions are summarized as follows:Firstly,mind map-based spoken English classroom activity design in middle school can stimulate students’ interest,improve the initiative and enthusiasm and improve communicative ability.Transforming complex spoken English problems into clear mind mapping can help students solve more difficult speaking problems.However,when using mind mapping,students may spend too much time on drawing and coloring,but ignore mind mapping itself.Therefore,teachers need to offer a guidance for students.Secondly,mind map-based spoken English classroom activity design of middle school helps students change single learning strategy and enrich learning methods.In fact,the process of making mind mapping is the process of finding the connection between background knowledge and new knowledge,it can change previous mechanical learning methods and English teachers should guide students to make a combination.Thirdly,mind map-based spoken English classroom activity design of middle school can enrich the strategies of classroom activity design.It helps teachers learn to design spoken English activities based on mind mapping in the process of teaching,and even apply mind mapping into any other areas of English teaching and other subjects to reform and improve their original designing methods.