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

Reading, as an essential means to obtain knowledge and information, is universally regarded as one of the most effective ways to learn English well. Junior middle school is the fundamental and crucial period of English learning, and the English teachers there are required to develop the language competence concerning language knowledge, language skills, learning strategies, affective attitude as well as cultural awareness comprehensively so as to achieve quality-oriented education. However, the current situation of English reading is not optimistic. The problems, such as losing interest in English reading, not being capable of getting the main idea of the text by using suitable reading strategies, not being able to understand the logical relationship between each paragraph and failing to wholly understand the meaning of the discourse, prevent the development of reading comprehension ability and lead to the lack of interest in English reading. In order to change the current situation and make the student-centered teaching come true, teachers are devoted to exploring more effective teaching methods so as to motivate students’ reading interest and encourage students to engage in class activities. Mind map, a tool to organize and represent knowledge systematically, was proposed by Tony Buzan in the early 1960s, which reflects the radiant thinking of human’s mind. It is a technique to visualize thoughts and knowledge structure and a valid instrument used to memorize, comprehend and think, which can be adopted to foster the creative and divergent thinking ability. Therefore, it has been wildly applied in various fields especially in education. However, the application of mind map is not pervasive particularly in junior middle school period. Therefore, this thesis researches on the application of mind map in English reading teaching in junior middle school and tries to answer the following questions:(1) Can the application of mind map in English reading teaching motivate students’ English reading interest and improve their class engagement in junior middle school?(2) Can the application of mind map in English reading teaching help students use suitable reading strategies to improve their reading speed and to process information effectively in junior middle school?(3) Can the application of mind map in English reading teaching improve students’ reading comprehension ability in junior middle school?Based on the previous researches and theoretical guidance of interactive reading model and mind map, the present study adopts questionnaire and experiment as instrument, which was conducted in paralleled classes of grade nine in Liang Daojie Junior Middle School in Wu Han. The experimental class applied mind map to the English reading teaching while the contrastive class took traditional method such as bottom up model.92 students were involved in total and the research lasted for 3 months. Questionnaires, pre-test and post-test were used to collect data. Then SPSS 16.0 was employed to analyze the data and statistics.Through the results and discussion of the questionnaire and experiment, the research manifests that the application of mind map is able to improve students’ English reading comprehension ability effectively on the whole. The questionnaire results show that the adoption of mind map can motivate students’English reading interest, further promote students’ class engagement and expand students’ reading amount after class; students are able to use suitable reading strategies to abstract and process information quickly and accurately. Besides, great progress have achieved in the aspect of reading comprehension after the implementation of experiment. Students are able to understand, analyze and summarize the text effectively. In spite of the limitations of this research, I still hope that the research could enrich the theoretical application of mind map especially in English reading in junior middle school and thus could provide some references for the further study. What’s more, the results are expected to encourage more teachers to adopt mind map to the teaching of English reading and to support further exploration of the application of mind map in English reading teaching for our practical teachers.