Exploring Junior High School EFL Students’ Engagement In Collaborative Mind Maps

As an interface between literacy and orality,the read-to-retell task provides a possibility to cultivate EFL learners’ communicative competence.Being an effective task to enhance the interactive process and cooperative learning effectiveness in read-to-retell tasks,foreign language educators introduce the collaborative mind map into read-to-retell tasks to improve EFL students’ performance in this task.However,the existing research seldom addresses how the collaborative mind maps in read-to-retell tasks affect EFL learners’ literacy and orality.In addition,a plethora of research viewed the mind map as a final product rather than exploring its designing process,and little research probes how students engage in utilizing mind maps in read-to-retell tasks.In order to fill this gap,this research aims to explore how students engage in utilizing mind maps in read-to-retell tasks to present the process of students’ engagement in this task,and reveal the relationship between students’ engagement and read-to-retell tasks.Based on the student engagement framework,a mixed method is applied to explore 102 junior high school students’ engagement from behavioral engagement,cognitive engagement,and affective engagement.This research aims to answer three questions: 1)How do EFL students behaviorally engage in read-to-retell tasks through collaborative mind maps? 2)How do EFL students cognitively engage in read-to-retell tasks through collaborative mind maps? 3)How do EFL students affectively engage in read-to-retell tasks through collaborative mind maps?Multiple data sources include discussion recordings,products of group collaborative mind maps,videos of student’s oral presentations,semi-structured interviews,and questionnaires.The results of this research indicate: In the behavioral engagement,students imitate display schema,adjust different patterns of division of labour,and apply various design modes.In the cognitive engagement,students apply code-switching strategy,structuring and restructuring strategy,and rehearsal strategy.In the affective engagement,although students’ overall attitudes towards this task are positive,different students hold different emotional reactions towards it.The group shown first provides a standard for the rest of the groups to imitate the display form in the same community.The functional division of labour and the structure division of labour are two main patterns of division of labour students adopted.A variety of modes are used in collaborative mind maps to present students’ understanding of articles.Code-switching strategy is used to enhance the interaction between students and students and between students and articles to improve students’ academic performance.Structuring and restructuring strategy are used to divide the structure of the article and reconstruct the structure of the collaborative mind map resorting to the article paragraphs and exercises.Rehearsal strategy can be realized through engaging students in contact with the target language repeatedly and recombining the main idea of the material.Students’ overall attitudes towards this task are positive.Students with high English proficiency levels feel relaxed and get a rational feeling.But emotional reactions towards this task for students with low language proficiency levels are mixed.This study explores EFL students’ engagement in utilizing collaborative mind maps in read-to-retell tasks.It enriches novel empirical evidence on the theoretical link between student engagement in collaborative mind maps and read-to-retell performance,visualizes student’s input process,and offers pedagogical implications for utilizing the collaborative mind map to motivate and facilitate EFL students’ retelling performance.