An Empirical Study On The Application Of Mind Map To English Reading Teaching In Senior High Schools

English reading is an important part of English learning.Nowadays,teachers in senior high schools have put much efforts and time into English reading teaching but they haven't got many satisfactory results.Teachers still pay much attention on the preparation of reading materials before classes and ignore analysis of students' learning process.Therefore,it is urgent to adopt new teaching methods to stimulate students' mind,enhance classroom transactions and improve integrated language competence in senior high schools,especially in English reading teaching.Mind map is a diagram used to represent human's thinking process.It is an effective method to help students improve their divergent thinking and allow teachers to guide students in the reading process.In addition,it is also an important tool in stimulating students' English learning interest as well as developing and training their reading comprehension competence.This thesis aims to explore the effectiveness of mind map in English reading teaching for senior high school students and find out whether it can improve students' learning interest and attitude,influence students'reading comprehension competence.On the basis of constructivism and schema theory,sixteen weeks'research was conducted in Pingxiang Middle School of Pingxiang city,Jiangxi province.The subjects involved in the experiment are 80 students from two classes in senior two,one is control class and the other is experimental class.Control class adopted the traditional approach while experimental class adopted mind map to English reading.The thesis discusses two questions:(1)What effects does the application of mind map have on students'learning interest and attitude in English reading?(2)What effects does the application of mind map have on students'comprehension competence?In order to solve the above questions,the author employed research instruments:one questionnaire,one pre-test paper and one post-test paper.The author collected data from pre-test,post-test and questionnaires in the experimental class and the control class and analyzed data by SPSS 21.0.The study reveals that 1)students from the experimental class have improved their interest and attitude in reading significantly due to the application of mind map in English reading teaching,while those students in the control class taught with traditional teaching methods have no obvious improvement in the above mentioned two aspects;2)due to the application of mind map in English reading teaching,students in the experimental class have apparently improved their English reading comprehension competence while the control class taught with traditional teaching method haven't improved theirs greatly.The study indicates that applying mind map to English reading teaching in senior high schools is workable and valid.However,because of the limitation of place and time,two main limitations are existed in this research--sample size and experimental duration.The experiment only lasted for 16 weeks and only 80 students took part in the experiment,hence the results of the research should be prudent to draw conclusions.Thus,the further research should last longer and cover a larger sample size.