The Application Of Graphic Organizers To English Reading Teaching In Junior High School

Graphic organizers are teaching strategies prevailing in European and American countries.They are visual representations of knowledge and a way of structuring information and arranging important aspects of a concept or topic into a pattern.Reading,as one of the most important input in English learning,plays a major role in English classes.It can not only promote learners’ language learning,but also be conducive to learners’ thinking ability.In reading teaching for middle school students,how to use graphic organizers to help students to build knowledge and to better understand the texts are all worth studying.Scholars at home and abroad have done a lot of research about the definition,classification and functions of graphic organizers.However,the research on how to use graphic organizers to promote students’ reading ability in reading teaching for junior high school is still very limited.The research aims to apply graphic organizers（GOs）in English teaching in junior high school for improving reading teaching efficiency.Based on the concept of the GOs and the analysis of different text types,the GOs are divided into different categories,such as thematic maps,spider maps,story maps and so on.The component skills of reading ability include vocabulary learning,classifying skills,interpreting skills,inferring skills and summarizing skills and so on.The research is intended to find out: 1)the common types of graphic organizers adopted by junior high school students;2)the effects of different types of graphic organizers on students’ reading ability;3)the strategies of applying graphic organizers in daily reading teaching.Two cycles of action research were carried out for three months and some graphic works were collected from the students.The participants of the study are from one class of Grade eight in No.7 Yucai Middle School,which is a key public junior high school in Chengdu.The textbook is Go for it published by People’s Education Press.Eight passages which are suitable for the research are selected as the teaching materials.At the beginning,the teacher will provide students with framework of some graphic organizers for them because they are not familiar with the types of graphic organizers.Later,the teacher will ask students to read and choose appropriate graphic organizers themselves.Through three-month observation,interview with students and questionnaires,the results were collected and further analyzed.In the research,it is found that five common types of graphic organizers are frequently adopted by the students based on the discourse types of the texts: thematic maps,story maps and spider maps,Venn diagrams and Tcharts.The application of the graphic organizers has effects on students’ reading skills,including vocabulary learning,classifying skills,interpreting skills,inferring skills and summarizing skills.Based on the findings,this study also suggested that the selection of graphic organizers should be based on the text types.The teacher can also provide support for students by giving framework or sample of the graphic organizer and the teacher should be equipped with the abilities to design various reading activities based on different graphic organizers and so on.