A Study On The Application Of Mind Mapping On Junior High School Students' English Writing

Nowadays,English is more and more popular in our daily life.The secondary school English teachers have raised their awareness of the importance of English writing.Writing is one of the 4 basic skills in English learning.English writing is a visual way to express writer's inner thoughts so that the authors have a better communication with readers.It has played a very important role in students' studies,especially the students in the junior high school.Under this kind of situation,not only students,but also teachers attach much attention to the writing training.Unfortunately,the results are not satisfied.For teachers,they haven't found out a good way which is impactful to their English writing teaching.For many students,there are many difficulties when writing,such as detail lacks,sequencing incompletion,boring language and so on.Therefore,the improvement of students' English writing ability and the promotion of writing interest have become extremely urgent for both teachers and students in secondary schools.Mind map is am image which is formed by many divergent branches steamed from a center picture or a word.The factors of this kind image are words,pictures,branches,and colors.By drawing the mind map,people can see their divergent thinking process clearly and reveal the relationships between the topics and the subtopics.In addition,the scattered information and thoughts can be organized logically by applying mind mapping technique when writing.The purpose of this research is to apply the mind mapping technique in junior high school and find out its effectiveness.Thus the research questions are following:1)Compared with the traditional English writing teaching method,is the teaching technique of mind mapping more effective in improving the students' writing scores?2)In writing content,organization,and language use which one does mind mapping have the most impact on,and which one does it have the least impact on?3)What are the students' attitudes toward mind mapping teaching technique?The participants of this research are the students in a junior high school in Grade 9.These 73 students belong to 2 parallel classes,which are selected as experimental class and control class.And these students are taught by the same teacher.The teacher adopted the teaching technique of mind mapping in the experimental class while the traditional teaching of writing was maintained in the control class.In order to get a true and valid experimental results,the researcher will adopt three instrument,including questionnaires,tests and interviews.Data collection is analyzed by SPSS 21.0.The main research findings are following:1)the students in the experimental class have better English writing scores than the students in the control class.2)In the experimental class,the students' compositions are equally improved in their writing content,organization and language use.3)The Students' writing interest and motivation get enhanced through the training of mind mapping technique.Students have a positive attitude towards mind mapping.Based on the major findings,the author puts forward the implications for teaching practice,the limitations of the study and the suggestions for the subsequent researches.