A Study On Applying Mind Mapping To English Writing Teaching In Junior High School

With the advent of the information age and the global economy,English has become increasingly important.As one of the most important language skills,writing is also playing an indispensable role in English learning.However,despite both teachers and students have put a lot of energy into it,the result is still unsatisfying.Students are not interested in English writing,the teaching methods are conservative and inefficient.Students don't know how to start a given topic and the writing scores are expected to get higher.Thus,how to effectively improve the junior high school students' English writing ability has become a very difficult problem for most English teachers.Therefore,in the face of the current situation of writing teaching,this study aims to explore the application of Mind Mapping in junior high school English writing teaching.Mind Mapping is a visual diagram method of thinking which was put forward by the British psychologist Tony Buzan in the 1960 s.Mind Mapping is with a central theme in the center of a “map”,connecting multiple branches to start thinking upon the topic,expressing the relationship between multiple branches in an illustrative form.Mind Mapping can help students organize ideas and information in their minds,seek out new thoughts from the brain,provide them writing framework and solve the problems of not knowing what to write and how to put the opinions.Based on the method of Mind Mapping,the following questions are explored.Is Mind Mapping a more effective method than the traditional in improving students' English writing abilities? Does applying Mind Mapping to English writing class in junior high school improve students' attitudes toward English writing as well as help students form good writing habits? How is Mind Mapping applied in English writing class?In this study,100 students from the 8th grade of Xiamen Caitong school were selected as the subjects.The experiment was conducted in two parallel classes and lasted about one semester,and the Mind Mapping was applied to the junior high school English writing teaching activities.Literature research,questionnaires,experimental research and interviews were applied in this paper.Statistic Package for Social Science(SPSS)is the software used to analyze questionnaire data and the data before and after the experiment.It is found that the application of Mind Mapping effectively improves the students' English writing ability;drawing Mind Maps help students form a strong logical way of thinking,which,to a certain extent,promotes the students to develop good English writing habits;learning how to use a certain writing strategies and methods not only improves their writing levels,but also betters their attitudes towards writing.This study shows that Mind Mapping,as a visual tool of thinking,can help students to be broad in thinking and to make the sentences smooth,the logic clear and the content rich in their writings.The results and findings of this study provides some beneficial bases and reference to the further research and writing teaching.