A Study On The Application Of Concept Map And The Cultivation Of Divergent Thinking In Junior High School Students

In Compulsory Education,English Curriculum Standard(2011)provided the necessity to cultivate students’ thinking ability.Divergent thinking ability is among one of the most important thinking skills and reading is the primary way of English teaching,in which text interpretation is the premise as a kind of teaching concept.Therefore,interpreting the reading text undertook the task of cultivating students’ divergent thinking.At present,the concept map has been widely used as the teaching tool for interpreting reading texts.This application has had an impact on students’ thinking improvement.The author followed the principle of "three-step of text interpretation" according to the current reading teaching mode(PWP),and designed the teaching tasks to verify whether the application of the concept map in text interpretation can enhance students’ divergent thinking.The study was conducted with Grade Eight students of A Middle School in Tai’an as subject with main use of questionnaires,interviews and experimental methods.Questionnaires and interviews were used to understand the current state of student divergent thinking.There were two parallel classes in this experiment,one as the experimental class(E.C)with the concept map applied to interpret the text,while another one as the control class(C.C)receiving traditional teaching method.Before and after the experiment,the students of the two classes were tested for divergent thinking,and the SPSS19.0 software was used to calculate the pre-and post-test scores to analyze the students’ divergent thinking ability and the changes of fluency,flexibility and creativity.The results have shown that the students’ divergent thinking needs to be further improved and applying the concept map to text interpretation can improve students’ divergent thinking.In particular,there has been a marked improvement in their thinking fluency and creativity.The author further concluded that the concept map has important application value for improving students’ divergent thinking.