A Research On The Application Of Mind Maps To English Reading Teaching In Senior High Schools

Starting from the application of mind maps to English reading teaching in senior high schools,this research explores the effects of the application of mind maps on students’ reading achievement scores and interest in reading.According to the Knowledge Visualization Theory,Schema Theory and Constructivism Theory,this research mainly tries to answer the following two questions:（1）What kind of effects does applying mind maps to English reading teaching in senior high schools have on students’ reading achievement scores?（2）How does the application of mind maps to English reading teaching in senior high schools play a role in students’ interest in reading?Also,we put forward two application principles of timely mapping and moderately mapping,as well as three application strategies of using mind maps to brainstorm,using mind maps to illustrate the text,and using mind maps to review.Knowledge Visualization Theory suggests that the representation of knowledge in visual tools such as charts can help learners understand knowledge deeply and remember them firmly,and mind map is such a visualization tool.With the help of mind maps,teachers can guide students to structure and visualize the reading materials,which helps them not only grasp the text from a macro perspective,but also pay attention to the detailed information,thus promote their deeper learning of the reading materials,deepen their understanding and memory of knowledge,thereby improving their learning ability and thinking quality,which is manifested as the improvement of reading achievement scores and reading interest.Schema Theory holds that schemas are the basic units which promote people’s cognition,and mind map is a kind of stable structured schema.With the help of mind maps,learners can store textual knowledge in their cognitive systems in stable forms,which helps them to memorize the knowledge and extract them at any time,so as to cultivate their language ability and thinking quality,thus improve their reading achievement scores and reading interest.Constructivist Theory emphasizes that under the guidance of teachers,students complete new knowledge construction based on their own knowledge and experience,and proposes the scaffolding teaching model.Exactly,the design and implementation of mind maps are consistent with Constructivist Theory.Providing students with the “scaffolding” of learning in the form of mind maps can effectively mobilize students’ autonomy and participation as well as help them complete the new knowledge construction step by step,so as to achieve the goal of improving their reading achievement scores and stimulating their interest in reading.In order to verify the effects of mind maps on senior high school English reading teaching,114 students,coming from two classes in Grade 2 of a senior high school in Xinyang City,were selected as participants for this research and an eighteen-week teaching experiment was conducted.Before the experiment,we used a questionnaire and a pre-test paper to test the students’ interest in reading and reading ability in both of the two classes respectively.The test results showed that there was no significant difference between the two classes in terms of reading interest and reading ability.During the experiment,we applied mind maps to teach English reading in the EC,while used the Grammar-Translation method in the CC as usual.At the same time,in order to better understand the attitudes of teachers and students towards the application of mind maps,we conducted interviews with the English teachers from Grade 2 and some students from the EC.After the experiment,by analyzing the data,it was found that the mean scores of the EC were higher than those of the CC,which were statistically significantly different.In addition,the interview results also showed that the application of mind maps in English reading teaching was significantly and positively associated with most students’ interest in reading and reading achievement scores.Therefore,we concluded that applying mind maps to English reading teaching in senior high schools has a positive effect on improving students’ reading achievement scores and plays a positive role in enhancing students’ interest in reading.