An Empirical Study On The Application Of Mind Map To English Vocabulary Teaching In Junior High School

Vocabulary is regarded as the foundation of foreign language learning,which is related to the four skills,listening,speaking,reading and writing.It is apparent that vocabulary is the key element in second language acquisition and only through acquiring enough words can one encounter fewer barriers in foreign language learning.Appropriate approaches are extremely important in promoting the process of vocabulary learning and enhancing the effectiveness of vocabulary learning.However,vocabulary teaching has been a weak part in junior high school.Teachers pay less attention to the vocabulary teaching approaches and students learn vocabulary just through rote memorization,which result in that students gradually lose the interest in learning English words and they can not master vocabulary well.Therefore,it is extremely necessary for teachers to explore some practical vocabulary teaching and learning approaches to decrease the burden of vocabulary learning.Mind Map is firstly created by Tony Buzan in the 1970 s and the core of Mind Map is“radiant thinking”.As a kind of tool to express the radiant thinking,Mind Map can arouse peoples' inner awareness to monitor their thinking process,which is beneficial to encourage people to develop imagination,association and memorization.Many linguists and language educators consider that appropriate teaching methods can make a difference to vocabulary teaching and learning.In view of this,this study aims to apply Mind Map to English vocabulary teaching,and it mainly explores the two research questions:1.Can the application of Mind Map inspire students' interest of vocabulary learning?2.Can the application of Mind Map improve students' vocabulary proficiency?In order to answer above two research questions,an experiment from September 2017 to December 2017 was conducted.105 students of Grade Eight from No.8 Junior High School in Wuwei,Gansu Province was selected as the experiment participants and they were from Class 6 and Class 7.The two equivalent classes were chosen as the Control Class(CC)and Experiment Class(EC)randomly.The Mind Map teaching method was carried out in the EC,whereas the CC was still taught through the traditional teaching method.Questionnaires,tests and interview were employed as the research instruments.At the same time,SPSS statistical software was used to analyze the data collecting from questionnaires and tests.The results showed that the students in the EC had more interest in vocabulary learning and did better in the post-test after the experiment.Therefore,a conclusion is made that the application of Mind Map to vocabulary teaching is feasible and effective,and the application of Mind Map to vocabulary teaching can stimulate junior high school students' vocabulary learning interest and improve their English vocabulary proficiency.