A Study On The Effectiveness Of Using English As A Guidance To Promote High School English Reading Teaching

Reading is a very important resource for people to obtain information and knowledge. In the field of teaching and learning, reading is a very important means of acquiring English knowledge and improving English reading skills. Both the New Curriculum Standards and the College Entrance Examination of Jiangsu Province where there is a new test item type called task-based reading have put forward higher requirements about high school students’English reading competence. However, there are still some disadvantages in the teaching and learning of English reading, which leads many students not to meeting the above discussed requirements.Mind mapping was put forward by Tony Buzan in1960s. It is a powerful tool and an effective way to visualize the process of thinking. Therefore, this study tries to apply Mind Mapping into the teaching and learning of English reading in high schools, aiming at researching its effectiveness as a teaching method and learning means and revealing that whether it can stimulate students’learning interests of English reading, improve students’ reading skills, and increase the efficiency of English reading course in high schools.This research selects two parallel classes (N=77) in one high school in Nanjing as subjects, lasting nearly four months. The experiment uses different research methods such as literature review, questionnaires and reading comprehension tests in order to collect the data and analyze them in T-Test by using the software SPSS. The significant difference is obtained from the experimental group who applied the Mind Mapping into the teaching and learning of English reading comprehension compared with the control group who were taught by the traditional method. The results of the research indicate that the teaching of English reading comprehension in high school through the technique of Mind Mapping can stimulate students’learning interests of English reading and actively want to read English articles extensively after class; can broaden students’reading strategies and skills so as to obtain information quickly from the text; can improve students’integrated reading ability to analyze the macro structure of the texts, summarize the main idea of the texts and the Author’s intention, understand the opinions and the attitudes of the texts and assess the texts. Some suggestions for the further research of applying Mind Mapping into the teaching and learning field of English reading are proposed at last.