The Application Of Mind Map To English Reading Teaching In Junior High School

Mind map is a visual knowledge representation tool which was invented by British famous psychologist Tony Buzan in the 1960 s. It combines keywords and graphics with color which has great effect on improving people’s comprehension and divergent thinking ability, so it has been widely used in foreign countries in many fields. However, domestic application of mind map started relatively later than foreign countries which makes unsatisfied widespread. Reading is an important way for learners to acquire knowledge and information, so that the improvement of reading ability is of great importance for English learners. English reading teaching occupies a key role in junior high school English teaching. However, many teachers still apply the traditional method of teaching reading at present. This study will apply mind map to junior high school English teaching of reading, to guide students how to draw mind map in pre-reading, while-reading and post- reading, to find an effective way of improving the quality and effectiveness in junior high school English reading teaching.Eighty students were chosen as research subjects from eighth grade, two parallel classes of Zhang chu junior high school in Xishui County, Hubei province, and the experiment lasted for 5 months. In this paper, methods such as literature, interview and questionnaire and experiment research have been adopted, and the following aspects were mainly studied: first of all,the author introduced the definition, features and theories as well as studies home and abroad, and theories of mind map, related studies of reading are also introduced, this paper wants to find out the feasibility of mind map in junior high school English reading teaching. Apart from that, a contrast experiment and a questionnaire survey were also performed, and the experimental data was collected and analyzed by the SPSS statistical software.The experiment revealed that the students’ average score in the experiment class with mind map is higher than that in control class with traditional teaching method.With this experiment, we prove that the application of mind map in the junior highschool English reading teaching can arouse students’ interest in English learning and reading, which helps students have a deeper and overall understanding of the text and improves the students’ ability of generalization and retelling the text.According to the experiment of applying mind map to eighth-grade’s English reading course, it have tested the effectiveness of mind map in junior high school English reading teaching. In the first place, mind map shifts the role of teacher, it gives play to students’ autonomy that let them participate in learning actively; What’s more, Mind map cultivates students’ reading skills, strengthening their organization and summarization ability of knowledge, and have great effect on improving students’ comprehensive ability in English listening, speaking, reading and writing and so on.