The Influence Of The Mind Map On The Writing Result Of Senior Students With Different Cognitive Styles

In a way,writing can reflect one's integral level of English.Therefore,as one of the four basic skills,writing has played a significant role in English teaching and learning.The New National English Curriculum Standards(2003)demands more on students' writing skill in senior high schools.Teachers and students' attention should be paid to students' comprehensive ability of using English,not only to vocabulary and grammar.Furthermore,writing is a reflection of students' comprehensive ability of using English.However,it is time-consuming,low-efficient and difficult to improve students' writing scores,which makes teachers in trouble.The mind map,an auxiliary tool,starting from the central theme,setting up other correlated branches with key words or shapes,and visualizing the radiant thinking through the changes of colors and fonts,may be used as a visualized teaching tool to facilitate students' writing.Hence,this research is designed to investigate whether the application of the mind map in English writing can improve students' writing results or not.The research method is quasi-experimental method.The participants are 85 students from two intact classes in Senior One and an English teacher in Xinhe No.1middle school.The two classes are taught by the same English teacher but in different ways,the Task-based teaching method(universally applied in English teaching of most seniors schools)in the control class and the application of the mind map in the experimental class.By conducting questionnaires,writing tests,the Group Embedded Figure Test and interview on the participants,the research aims to explore the two questions:(1)Compared with the typical Task-based teaching method,can the application of mind map in writing teaching effectively improve students' writing scores?(2)How students with different cognitive styles(Field Independent or Field Dependent)perform in their writing after the training of the mind map?The results from this research presents that students in the experimental class make greater progress in writing than students in the control class after the application of the mind map.The writing scores of both field dependent students and field independent students in the experimental class have significantly improved.The meanscore of field dependent students is much higher than that of field independent students.Based on the experimental process and data analysis of this research,the author suggests application of the mind map may become a facilitator of writing teaching and it's desirable for writing instructors to design different activities according to students' different cognitive styles.Of course,the limitation and expectation for future research are also provided.