On The Application Of Mind Map In Junior Middle School English Vocabulary Teaching

This thesis is a tentative study on the application of mind map in junior middle school English vocabulary teaching.English vocabulary is basic to English learning,and it plays an important role in listening,speaking,reading and writing.However,there is a common phenomenon that less attention is paid to scientific methods of vocabulary acquisition in English learning.Many English teachers teach vocabulary with a fixed routine: they lead students to read English words,spell every word,give Chinese equivalents,make up sentences with important words,and at last,let students memorize them after class.Many English teachers regard vocabulary memorization as a task of students themselves,and most students memorize words by mechanical repetition which has long been proved ineffective.Besides,many English vocabulary books for students are arranged in an alphabetical order.It is conducive to look up new words,but does not conform to the law of memory.This arrangement breaks up English words in the same group into different pieces and makes students feel tired in memorizing.English words become isolated and scattered.Students are accustomed to such an arrangement.They memorize these words in a given order.These phenomena lead to the high rate of forgetting,unscientific knowledge structure and wrong way of thinking.Therefore,it is necessary for English teachers to find a new and scientific method to help students to learn English vocabulary efficiently.Mind map,created by Tony Buzan in 1970 s,is a visual cognitive model.It is a way of drawing knowledge by using different means and it is easy to remember.Mind map is easily accepted by the brain because of the use of lines,symbols,words and images when drawing a map.It combines the visual and spatial aspects,which enables the brain to be the most active,making people's thought clear by combining the left and right hemispheres of the brain together and controlling the brain to work in a balanced way.Enlightened by Tony Buzan,a large number of studies were conducted in recent years.Many of them focused on improving students' abilities of writing and reading.However,this thesis focuses on the application of mind map in vocabulary teaching,and explores how vocabulary mind map affects students' vocabulary acquisition.There were 114 students from two parallel classes of one junior middle school of Biyang county involving in this experiment.Class 2 was randomly chosen as the experimental class,and Class 7 was the control class.The experiment had lasted for four months.During the experiment,the mind map of vocabulary teaching was used in the experimental class,and the control class still used the old teaching method.Through the experiment,the author aims to find the answers to the following questions:1.What is the effect of the mind map on junior school students' attitude towards vocabulary acquisition?2.How does mind map improve junior middle school students' vocabulary memorization?Questionnaires,tests and SPSS were used as instruments in this research.From the results of data analysis and discussion,major findings were concluded:1.Students have positive attitudes toward vocabulary learning after the application of vocabulary mind map.Their interests and confidence are stimulated,and their self-learning abilities are enhanced.2.The application of vocabulary mind map improves the correct rate of words spelling,lowers students' forgetting rate of words,enlarges students' vocabulary size,and enhances abilities of words' extraction and reproduction of students.In spite of some inevitable limitations such as limited time and inadequate participants,the findings provide the author with some valuable experience to continue the research in depth in the future.