An Empirical Research On The Application Of Mind Map In English Reading Teaching In Junior High School

Reading is a primary component in English teaching and leaning and it is one of the important resources of language input.National English Curriculum Standards for Nine-Year Compulsory Education(2011)has put forward the importance of cultivating students' reading competence.However,there are still disadvantages of present reading teaching in junior high school.For example,students fail to find the main idea of the passage and can't think over the questions on the whole.Most students also have difficulties in understanding logical relationships between sentences or paragraphs,which causes the low level students' loss of interests in learning English reading.In addition,the traditional reading teaching mode of grammar explaining and sentence-translating in the background of the exam-oriented education also prevents students' from developing reading competence.Due to the above problems existing in the present English reading teaching,more and more educators and researchers begin to advocate the quality-oriented education and students-centered teaching mode.As the performers of the teaching work,the teachers are responsible for exploring effective teaching ways to arouse students' reading interests and develop students' reading competence.Mind Map,which originated in the early 1960 s and was first put forward by Tony Buzan,was a kind of graphic tool to represent the information and express the radiant thinking.Mind Map concentrates on the design of the central graph.The basic theories of applying Mind Map in this research are information processing theory,brain science theory,and discourse analysis theory.The author conducts one term experiment from September in 2015,which involves 60 students in two parallel classes of Grade One in Hong Wen junior high school.To compare with the traditional reading teaching method,several research methods are applied,such as the questionnaire,interview,and tests and so on.This research focuses on three questions as follows:1.What are the effects of Mind Map to English students' reading achievements and reading abilities?2.What are the effects of Mind Map to teachers' English reading teaching?3.How does Mind Map apply effectively to the English reading teaching of junior high school?This research not only testifies that Mind Map is useful for analyzing the reading passage and remembering the key language information,but also explores the effective methods of applying Mind Map to English reading teaching.The author takes the reading part of the teaching Book 7A pressed by Foreign Language Teaching as the major teaching materials.These examples can provide other teachers with the references when they use Mind Map to teach 7A.The existing data can be taken as the base for researchers to do furtherresearches.The research draws the conclusion from the data analysis that teaching with the assist of Mind Map in junior high school can stimulate students' interests and passion for English learning,improve their reading competence and strategies,strengthen their long time memorization of key information,and broaden their radiant thinking abilities.The application of Mind Map in English reading teaching provides the new reading teaching method for teachers.Mind Map helps teacher adjust teaching plans,design teaching activities and build class atmosphere.At the same time,the teachers' abilities of organizing class and scientific research can be developed.Finally,considering the limitation of the present research,some suggestions for further research have been provided.