A Study On The Application Of Mind Map To English Vocabulary Teaching In Junior High School

Vocabulary is a factor of a language and plays a key role in learning a language.Xu et al.(2018)mentioned that vocabulary learning affects the cultivation and development of students’ learning ability.The cultivation of students’ comprehensive ability,the master of knowledge and the training of skills will be hard without enough vocabulary.However,the current vocabulary teaching and learning in junior high school is not optimistic.Teachers teach vocabulary in a single way and pay little attention to the connections between words and the cultivation of students’ vocabulary learning strategies.Students put effort on memorizing words but receive little results.It is still a problem for the teacher to make students memorize more words more efficiently.Mind Map as a visual thinking tool is helpful to learners’ vocabulary learning.This paper applies the Mind Map tool to junior high school vocabulary teaching to help students build and strengthen connections between words and improve the acquisition efficiency of receptive vocabulary.This paper selected 98 grade one students in No.19 Middle School as research participants.Class 2 is the experimental class,and class 3 is the control class.The traditional PPP teaching model was used in the control class.In class two,the experimental class,the Mind Map vocabulary teaching model was applied during the four-month experiment.The research mainly explores these two questions:(1)What is the current situation of English vocabulary learning for junior grade one students in No.19 Middle School?(2)What is the effect of the application of Mind Map to English vocabulary teaching on students’ receptive vocabulary size? The collected experiment data were analyzed by using SPSS 17.Through analyzing the results of the questionnaire and the test,most students acknowledge the importance of vocabulary learning and put much effort on vocabulary,but many of them lack motivation and confidence and still have problems in learning and memorizing words.Mind Map vocabulary teaching is conducive to students’ receptive vocabulary size and is helpful for junior one students to build connections between words to form a vocabulary network.The implications of this study are:(1)teachers should get deep understanding and theoretical knowledge of the Mind Map tool before applying it;(2)teachers should guide students to construct knowledge as a promoter in vocabulary learning,so that students are able to play the main role in learning;(3)teachers should pay attention to students’ cognitive and actual situation,differences among students should also be valued;(4)students’ communication and discussion should be encouraged.