An Application Of The Mind Map To English Reading Instruction In Senior High Schools: An Empirical Study

In domestic English reading instruction,most English teachers pay little attention to students' awareness of applying reading strategies systematically.Teachers' explanations occupy most of the time and what students need to do is just cooperation.That's to say,teachers' leading role is over students' dominant role.Students are always at a passive position,unable to read target materials,and always rely too much on teachers' explanations and guidance,so they cannot to apply reading strategies spontaneously,not to mention to improve reading proficiency.In recent years,the mind map has attracted more and more attention because of its powerful logicality and generality.Educator and scholars begin to focus on its relationship with reading instruction and do researches on whether mind map can play an auxiliary role in reading instruction.Both domestic and overseas researches show that,as a visual thinking tool,the mind map can improve students' memory,imagination as well as creativity and give full play to their brain function.Moreover,its comprehensive and radiant design can lead students to apply appropriate reading strategies effectively to analyze the reading materials.Then students can have a systematic and overall understanding of the materials,so they can do better in reading proficiency.Based on the constructivism theory and schema theory,as well as theory of mind map,the thesis mainly discussed the following two research questions:(1)What effects does the application of mind map to English reading instruction have on students' application of reading strategies in senior high schools?(2)What effects does the application of mind map to English reading instruction have on students' reading proficiency in senior high schools?The research subjects in this thesis were two parallel classes from Grade 2 in No.15 Middle School in Changsha.Two classes were randomly divided into experiment class and control class.During the experiment,the experiment class applied the mind map to English reading instruction while the control class still employed the traditional reading instruction mode.After analyzing the research background and significance,this thesis emphasized the application of the mind map to English reading instruction in senior high,mainly focusing on the influence the mind map had on students' application of reading strategies and reading proficiency.The results showed:(1)Because of the application of mind map,students in experiment class gained an obvious improvement in using reading strategies,especially in cognitive strategy and metacognitive strategy,which proved that students' ability of inferring,checking and concluding the information,skimming,scanning and analyzing the structure of reading materials were also improved.(2)Because of the application of mind map,the reading scores of experimental class and control class both had improved compared to the pre-tests.However,the control class who still employed the traditional teaching mode just had a slight increase while the experimental class who received new teaching mode under the instruction of mind map presented a significant progress.In a word,the findings of this experiment revealed that the mind map method had obvious positive effects on students' application of reading strategies and reading proficiency in senior high schools.However,there are still some limitations.For example,the research time,the design of students' mind maps and so on.Additionally,because of writer's inadequate research ability,there are also some deficiencies on the research angels and the analysis of research data.Yet,the thesis still has certain research significance which can provide a reference for later researches.