An Empirical Study On The Effectiveness Of Mind Mapping To Enhance English Reading Ability Among Junior High School Students

Mind Mapping,as a new thinking model,successfully achieves the visualization of the whole thinking process.It aims at activating both hemisphere of the human brain to make full use of the thinking capacity and following the original thought to arrange knowledge.Therefore,Mind Mapping shows unique effect in teaching and learning.However,in the traditional reading class,deeply influenced by the Grammar Translation Method,some teachers lay emphasis on sentence structures,words and expressions which drift off the objectives of reading and they always fails to arouse interest of EFL learners.Therefore,in order to facilitate the students' creativities and stimulate students'reading motivations,the current research attempts to apply Mind Mapping in English reading class and test its effectiveness.The research questions of this study include the following:1.In which aspects does Mind Mapping technique enhance students' reading ability?2.What are the attitudes of students and teachers towards Mind Mapping?3.What difficulties will teachers and students meet while applying Mind Mapping and how can teacher better use Mind Mapping in teaching activities?In the elementary phase of the research,the author clarifies the definition of Mind Mapping by making a comparison with concept Mapping.On the basis of reviewing relevant researches abroad and in China,the author finds out the gap between them.The author conducts an experiment on 72 second-grader junior high students from two parallel classes in Shenzhen Huangpu School.Two parallel classes are assigned to experimental group and control group.As to the experimental group,reading is taught with Mind Mapping technique.Students are exposed to the training of generating mind maps according to different reading materials.As to the control group,students are taught with the traditional method.After 8 weeks training,post-test is administered to students from both experimental group and control group.From the data analyzed by SPSS,the author finds out students in experimental group obtained better achievements than students in control group.In the post-implementation phase of the study,questionnaire method intends to find out how does Mind Mapping enhance students' English reading ability and the interview for the teacher intends to find out problems of applying Mind Mapping in reading class.The objectives of the current research are to learn about the current situations of teaching reading,to apply Mind Mapping in reading class,to find out the problems in the process of applying and to give suggestions.