Research On Application Of Graphic Organizers In Junior High School English Instruction

As visual thinking tools,graphic organizers are good tools and means to assist reading comprehension.In the specific teaching practice,how to apply them to assist reading,how to evaluate students’ comprehension of the reading texts,and what other problems they face in the process are the focuses of this research.In order to explore these issues,the author uses graphic organizers to instruct reading under the guidance of schema theory and “visual literacy”,takes observation,investigation and interview as the research instruments,and finally collects eight reading instruction cases for in-depth analysis.The research finds that the graphic organizers are applied to either stage of the reading classroom(pre-reading,while-reading,and post-reading),depending on the teaching objectives,and the genre of the reading text etc.Before reading,graphic organizers are used to introduce the text,either to activate students’ background knowledge or to review prior learning;during reading,graphic organizers are used to help students sort through the text,transforming disordered text into ordered charts to facilitate their comprehension;after reading,graphic organizers are used to evaluate students’ comprehension of the text and to summarize the text structure in preparation for the next writing output.Problems found in the research are as follows: 1)The most used grid chart,although applicable to a variety of genres of texts,is in a single form and lack vividness,making it difficult to mobilize some students’ interest in reading;2)Students have interests in learning graphic organizers other than grid charts,but lack opportunities to use them and have difficulty in using them;3)With teachers’ demonstrations in place,students still have difficulty in reading and tabulating on their own.Based on the above problems,possible suggestions are: 1)The teacher should select a variety of vivid graphic organizers according to the type of text to instruct reading;2)The teacher should provide additional appropriate reading materials and help to give students the opportunity to use diverse graphic organizers to assist their comprehension;3)The teacher should figure out where students’ difficulties arise(difficulties in reading ability/tabulation ability,etc.)and help them solve their difficulties in reading and tabulating independently according to their specific situations.