An Empirical Study Of The Application Of The Mind Map To English Teaching In Vocational School

Nowadays, with the development of economy in the world, English as an international language becomes more and more important. Lots of methods appears just like bamboos in spring in the field of English teaching, we know that there are many problems in vocational school students’English learning, such as spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, Chinglish and so on. The reasons lie in two facts:the first is the lack of the language environment; the students at home can’t overcome the negative transfer of mother tongue. The second is they can’t productive perfectly because of the inadequacy of language input. Therefore, it is for the teachers to find a way to help the students to acquire the target language to promote the awareness to develop the ability of understanding, and so to enlarge the students’input and output skills.In this paper, we will discuss about the mind map theory and input theory and constructivism theory etc. A few approaches are used to study the influence of using Mind map in teaching and learning. It includes documents approach, interviews and tests. Based on the interviews we know that most students have the interest in using Mind map in learning English. They are sure that Mind map is an effective approach. Using Mind map can make them learn new words and grammar easily. It can also help them improve the ability in understanding text material as a whole, in using the information of the text material to express their own ideas.It is found from the experimental results that the students in the experimental group performed significantly better than the control group in the texts. The exploratory study further reveals that the students in the experimental group have made a significant progress in grammar, vocabulary and cohesive devices.The study ensures the theory by a lot of data that Mind map is an effective approach vocational school students’English learning. We hope that this study can help teachers pay much attention to the process in using Mind map. The paper is expected to pave the way for those who would like to do some research in this field and for foreign language educators.