| In recent years, mind mapping has received much attention by numerous researchers and educators. Mind mapping is a visual tool for the knowledge representing, which is applied to different disciplines' teaching realm and unceasingly develops in breadth and depth. Because of radiant thinking characteristics of human beings, knowledge can be logically presented according to different themes, emphasis points by mind mapping. It promotes the understanding and memorizing of knowledge by providing abundant colors, lines, charts and so on. In the process of English writing teaching, mind mapping can put the scattered phrases together through the deep processing, thus to establish a clear knowledge structure to make the extraction and output of the knowledge more easily. However, the author has found that, mind mapping still did not give full play in various branches of teaching, and it just acted as an assisted teaching tool, the study only stayed in application level of mind mapping, there was not much research in specific teaching situation, and there was a lack of good consideration of mind mapping in integration with structure of specific discipline knowledge and teaching approaches. Lexical chunks are fixed and semi-fixed multiword units with high frequency, which is easy to memorize. Therefore, the author combined the visual mind mapping with lexical approach together and applied mind mapping as a basis to generate lexical chunks by divergent thinking in the process of English writing teaching, which expanded a new teaching method for writing and went on relevant empirical research on the effectiveness of the new approach. For this purpose, a 19-week longitudinal study was carried out and three research questions were put forward:(1) Can mind mapping-based lexical approach improve subjects' writing achievements?(2) Can mind mapping-based lexical approach improve the variety of lexical chunks in subjects' English writing?(3) What are subjects' attitude and satisfactory degree towards mind mapping-based lexical approach?102 junior nine students in Lanzhou number 7 middle school from two parallel classes were chosen as subjects for this study. This research lasted for 18 weeks from September 2015 to January 2016. In English writing class, control class used the traditional writing teaching method; while the experimental class applied lexical approach generated by mind mapping. The author collected and analyzed data of questionnaire, writing tests before and after experiment in experimental class and control class and tested by SPSS. The author reached the following conclusions:(1) After applying mind mapping-based lexical approach in English writing teaching, the experimental class has significant improvement in English writing achievement.(2) After 19-week training, compared post-test results in experimental class and control class, pre-test and post-test results in experimental class, the variety of lexical chunks in experimental class has greatly increased.(3) According to the pre-test and post-test of questionnaire in experimental class, it could be concluded that subjects' attitude towards English writing changed positively. Most students were satisfied with the new English writing teaching approach.The results of the study have shown that mind mapping-based lexical approach has practical and guiding significance to English writing teaching. However, how to apply the new teaching approach to listening, speaking, reading still need further thinking and study. |
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