An Empirical Study On The Application Of Mind Mapping To English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

Mind-mapping,firstly put forward by Tony Buzan in the 1960s,is a tool by which human can effectively reflect their radiating thoughts in the form of graphics.People can use graphs and words in the mind-map to express,organize and illustrate their ideas in order to make the fuzzy and disordered knowledge points to be clear and well organized.Mind-mapping can help learners to process,combine and sort various concepts,to construct knowledge and build up knowledge network,and to improve their logic and learning efficiency.In 2010,mind-mapping was introduced into the field of English teaching.But mostly it is employed in the English vocabulary teaching and seldom applied in the teaching and research field of English writing.In 2016,the Ministry of Education developed a program named 2017 College Entrance Examination Reform Program which has a higher requirement for students'writing ability.Large vocabulary,writing skills,context organization and thinking ability are all an important part of the students'writing ability.In fact,the Program has a higher requirement for English writing and how to improve learners writing ability by English teaching is becoming a question for all the English teachers.Mind-mapping can help learners enlarge their vocabulary,cultivate their divergent thinking ability and incremental text thinking ability and update their writing interest and context awareness.Therefore,this study plans to flexibly apply the mind-mapping method to the daily English teaching of the senior high school students in order to improve students'learning outcome.And track investigation will be carried out in order to check the students'learning process.The purpose of this study is to provide some references and examples for the English teaching class in the senior high school,to enrich teachers'teaching method,and to improve students'writing ability and the teachers'teaching effect.The paper has six parts.The first part shows the research background,the research purpose,content and significance.By collecting the domestic and foreign literature,the author summarized the basic methods and characteristics of writing teaching in this part.The second part talks about the definition of mind-mapping,its characteristic and its relevant theories and applications.The third part demonstrates how the mind-mapping could be used in the English teaching of senior high schools.The part is the key part of the whole paper.The experiment lasts for two months,with 60 12^th graders as subjects.The comparative research method is used in the experiment,with Class One as the experimental class and Class Two as the control class.Interview,questionnaire and English writing test—all the above three methods are employed in the research and the final data is analyzed by SPSS.The fourth part is about the result of the experiment and further analysis is offered.In this section,the author makes a comparison and analysis of the experiment results which prove that mind-mapping is much better than traditional teaching method because it can update students'interest in writing,improve their context organization ability and logic thinking ability.The fifth part reflects the application of mind-mapping in the foreign language teaching.The author shows the framework of English writing in senior high school and uses a specific case to demonstrate the application of mind-mapping in the teaching of writing.The last part is about the final conclusion of the research.Based on the experiment,the author draws the following conclusion:the application of mind-mapping can improve teachers'teaching method,inspire students'writing interest and update their writing level.Therefore,mind-mapping is an excellent teaching method to increase teaching effect of English writing and to create favorable conditions for students'further study and development.Finally the author analyses the limitation of the research and shows the prospects for further research.