A Study On Applying Concept Maps To English Reading At Junior High School

The new English Curriculum Standards call for a reform of English education in China’s Compulsory Education. As for English education at junior high school, students are expected to be actively involved in well-designed learning activities so that they acquire knowledge, develop skills, form correct values and improve their English proficiency. In order to achieve the goal of this reform under such new education background, there is a pressing demand for English teachers to update their educational conceptions, explore and innovate ways of English teaching and learning by translating their theoretical knowledge into classroom practice.Concept map, a diagram showing the meaningful relationships among concepts in the form of propositions, is a representation of meaning frameworks specific to a domain of knowledge for a given context of meaning. Concept maps are considered as a useful tool of organizing and representing knowledge. Many scholars and researchers have proved that the application of concept maps has a positive influence on school teaching and learning. For English teachers, concept maps, in theory, give them a new method to present teaching content and make English reading a more cognitively meaningful learning experience for students.This paper explores the application and effectiveness of concept maps in junior high school students’ English reading comprehension in order to produce insight on using concept maps in English reading teaching, and to help students use this new way to deal with reading and enhance their reading ability. The paper aims at finding out whether the use of concept maps has a positive influence on the improvement of students’ reading comprehension, how teachers help students improve their reading comprehension with concept maps in order to achieve meaningful learning, and how concept maps influence students’ability of using reading strategies.The experiment of this study was carried out in Yuli No.1High School at Kuerler, Xinjiang.90students in two classes of the eighth grade participated in the experiment, with46in the experimental class and44in the control class. The research used both qualitative method and quantitative method to diagnose problems in students’ English reading and to process and analyze the data. The data were collected from a questionnaire survey in experimental class before the experiment, an interview with six students in experimental class after the experiment, pre-test and post-test scores of both classes, and the author’s teaching journal of classroom observations of the changes of students’learning performance in the experimental class.Generally, in daily English reading teaching and learning based on concept maps, concept maps are used in three ways. The first way is that students are trained to read and understand sample concept maps so as to grasp the content and structure of the reading material. The second is students read and construct concept maps independently. And the third way is a comprehensive use the first two. Teachers provide students with incomplete concept maps, and students read and understand reading text, and then complete the withheld concepts, cross-links or hierarchies. In the case study of this paper, the author adopts the third way to illustrate and explain how concept maps are used in English reading teaching and learning to promote students’reading comprehension.Results of this study show that, the application of concept maps in reading class promotes students’ English reading comprehension as it is inductive to meaningful learning by integrating students’ prior knowledge with new knowledge, and improves students’ability of using reading strategies during the reading process.