| Vocabulary is a fundamental element in English learning.For Junior 3 students,mastery of vocabulary directly affects and determines the success or failure of Senior High School Entrance Examination of English.Therefore,vocabulary revision is one of the key points and difficulties in English revision before Senior High School Entrance Examination.The author is teaching in a junior middle school in the urban and rural border of Baiyun District,Guangzhou.At present,most Junior 3 students have poor English vocabulary base.In addition,Junior 3 students need to revise many subjects,so they have a limited amount of time to review English vocabulary.Traditional approaches for revising vocabulary,which are characterized by high input and low efficiency,make students feel bored about reviewing vocabulary.What's worse,they shrink back at the sight of vocabulary.Vocabulary becomes a lion in the way of revision for Senior High School Entrance Examination,and thus it is imperative to seek a better,more efficient method for reviewing vocabulary for junior 3 students in those schools like the author?s before Senior High School Entrance Examination.The author thinks of mind mapping.By applying mind mapping,words and phrases are connected into a network or entity that is interlinked and easy to remember as a whole,in order to enhance the effectiveness and interest for junior 3 students to review vocabulary.Mind mapping,a schematic method for memorization,is a graphical thinking tool that effectively expresses radioactive thinking and a thinking map used in memory,thinking,and learning.As a powerful graphical technology,mind mapping is seen as a universal key to releases the brain potential,and has been widely used in the world.However,domestic research on the application of mind mapping in English teaching is still in the exploratory stage.In particular,scarcely any research is about applyingmind mappings to reviewing English vocabulary before Senior High School Entrance Examination.For these reasons,the author has carried out an experimental study for one semester.The following two questions were studied:1.Can mind mapping,when applied to Junior 3 vocabulary revision,increase students' vocabulary size and improve their ability of using vocabulary?2.Can mind mapping increase students' initiative and interest in their Junior 3vocabulary revision?In the experiment,two junior three classes,from a junior middle school in Baiyun District in 2015,were selected as the experimental subjects.Class One,36 students,is chosen as control group(CG),and Class Two,35 students,is chosen as experimental group(EG).The author suggested that students in EG should apply mind mappings provided by the teacher or made by themselves to the final round of English vocabulary revision before Senior High School Entrance Examination,while the students in CG use traditional methods to review vocabulary.The experiment mainly adopts methods of pre-tests and post-tests,questionnaire surveys and interviews.Pre-tests of two classes were to verify whether EG and CG had the same level in memory ability and the English proficiency including the vocabulary part;Six post-tests of two classes were to verify the first research question in this experiment;Before and after the experiment of questionnaire survey and interviews focus on the students' feedback on the use of the mind mapping before and after the experiment,and thus leading to the result of the second research question.By statistical analysis with SPSS18.0,the author analyzed data collected from six post-tests and found that average score of EG and EC is beginning to show the gap in the third and fourth vocabulary tests;As time went on,a widening gap appeared in the fifth and sixth ones: the gap between the experimental group and control group has a rising tendency.An independent sample test by SPSS18.0 found that the first four post-tests showed no significant difference between the two groups,but in the fifth and sixth ones,it showed obvious difference,revealing that the number of vocabulary is larger and vocabulary using ability of the experimental group are better than those of the control group after the experiment.From the feedback of questionnaire surveys and interviews,it can be concluded that most of the students had a positive attitude toapplying mind mapping to vocabulary revision,and the students had certain initiative during reviewing vocabulary which was thought to be a boring thing in the past.Therefore,the interest of applying mind mapping to vocabulary revision has been verified.In conclusion,the study found that mind mapping as a thinking tool,used in Junior 3 vocabulary revision,helps to enlarge students' vocabulary size and improve students' ability to use vocabulary in sentences,that is,to a certain extent,it can enhance the effectiveness of Junior 3 vocabulary revision.And mind map can also stimulate students' initiative in vocabulary revision,and improve their interest in it. |
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