An Empirical Study Of High School Students’ English Reading Performance Based On Mind Map

Reading has long been acknowledged as a key part of senior middle school Englishteaching．However, the present circumstances and effects of the teaching of reading are notso ideal，mainly because of the negligence of reading strategies and lack of interests．Thisthesis tries to probe into the effects of Mind Map application in classroom reading uponimproving students’ reading interest and performance．This research is based on learning strategies of second language learning and also thetheories related to reading strategies. The research is based upon an empirical study with94students (47in each class) from two parallel classes in Grade Two of Xi Dong SeniorHigh School of Jiang Su Province as my research subjects, one used as the experimentalclass and the other used as the control one. In this research, the students were first surveyedabout their interest in English reading in order to find obstacles in their English learning.Meanwhile, the students were tested about their reading abilities. Afterwards, theexperimental class was trained purposefully in Mind Map application in English readingclass. Finally, the students were surveyed with the same questions and tested with similarreading exercises after the research to see how much they had improved.After comparing students’ marks before and after the training, the writer found thatthere appeared great progress in the marks of the experimental class after the training. Thisproves this training is very effective and efficient. Therefore, English teachers should raisetheir awareness of the importance of application of Mind Map in their reading classes, andmake every effort to improve the quality of their reading teaching, which will serve as anecessity to improve students’reading abilities and enhance their interest.