An Empirical Study On The Application Of Mind Map In English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School

Vocabulary teaching is the basis of English language teaching and learning.Vocabulary proficiency is one of the significant factors in the whole process of learning English,but vocabulary teaching has been a frail part in senior high school.Most students have negative attitude towards English vocabulary learning or memorizing,and they state that words memory is boring,mechanical and easy to forget.Meanwhile,the teachers cannot improve students' interest and it is an obstacle for senior high school students to remember words.Therefore,it is necessary to explore an effective method in English vocabulary teaching and memorizing.Mind Map is created by Tony Buzan in the 1970 s which is a kind of tool to express the radiant thinking.The typical characteristic of Mind Map is that people are able to utilize the function of the left and right brain reasonably as well as combine with colors,graphics,etc.to represent the learning knowledge,which is easy for people to master and memorize the information.Mind Map is helpful for people to enhance the creativity and memorization in some areas.The aim of the study is to verify the effectiveness of applying Mind Map in English vocabulary teaching and learning in Chinese study background.Thus the following questions need exploring:1.Can Mind Map improve the students' interest in English vocabulary learning?2.Can Mind Map improve the students' vocabulary proficiency?3.Is Mind Map helpful for students to retrieve more words and reproduce more words?Aiming at the above three research questions,the author conducts an empirical study which starts from September 2016 to December 2016.The author selects 82 students of Grade 2 at The First Senior High School in Beizhen as the experimental participants and they come from Class 2 and Class 3,two parallel classes are regarded as the Control Class(CC)and Experimental Class(EC)randomly.The students in CC learn vocabulary through traditional teaching method,while the students in EC learn and memorize English words by the method of Mind Map.After the experiment,through using SPSS to make a systematic analysis of the data on questionnaires,vocabulary tests and the final words memory test,and making the interview on 9 students selected randomly,the author draws the conclusions as follows: First,Mind Map can improve senior high school students' interest in English vocabulary learning.Second,Mind Map can improve the students' vocabulary proficiency in senior high school.Third,Mind Map is helpful for students toretrieve more words and reproduce more words.Therefore,the conclusions of this empirical study confirm that the application of Mind Map in English vocabulary teaching in Senior High School is favorable and useful.But according to some limitations of the experiment,the author proposes some suggestions that the future study should enlarge the experimental sample and extend the experimental period to guarantee the particularity and validity of the experiment.