Research On Application Of Mind Map In Teaching Of English Reading In Senior High School

Teachers in senior high schools have put much time and effort into the teaching of English reading but haven’t acquired satisfying results. Teachers pay too much attention on the preparation of teaching materials but ignore the role of students’ learning process. In the teaching process of English reading, teachers waste too much time on grammar rules and the content of the text, in which case students lose the chance to learn through their personal experience. A new teaching idea and method are urgently needed in reading teaching. Students can have more opportunities to analyze the text with their own experience through this new teaching idea and method.Mind map is a diagram used to visually organize information. It helps learners to organize complicated and scattered knowledge more logically and systematically. Mind map helps students explicitly show the thinking process and allow teachers to guide the students in the reading process. It is an important tool in training and developing students’thinking quality, as well as stimulating and guiding students’ independent thinking and creative thinking. This thesis aims to explore the effectiveness of Mind map in English reading teaching for senior school students, whether it can stimulate students’learning interests and enhance the interaction between teachers and students.The experiment of this thesis is held with two parallel science classes in one semester (from Sept,2015 to Jan,2016). We take 16 lessons of the reading course from 96 reading lessons as our research samples. By observing students’reading activity and the mind maps they produce during the experiment, I try to understand students’thinking process while reading. Besides, I make a comparative study of students’pretest and post-test scores. In addition, I also adopt the method combining qualitative with quantitative analyses to all the data collected.By means of investigation we arrive at a conclusion that with the help of Mind map, students’ interest towards reading materials gets enhanced, and their learning initiative and thinking ability are improved during the designing process as well. The application of Mind map in reading class shows students’ principal status in learning, and helps break the traditional English reading teaching mode and solves related problems in this field at the same time. After all the analyses above, we find that there is still a long way to go for suitable designs of Mind map to meet the need of senior high school’s English reading teaching.