An Action Research On Applying Thinking Visualization To Improve Junior Middle School Students' English Writing Performance

English writing is a cognitive process of linguistic output,and it occupies an important position in junior middle school' English teaching.However,the current Chinese junior middle school students have poor English writing skills.Many students don't make adequate preparations during the planning process,which led to unclear thinking and chaotic structure.Through literature review,we found that thinking visualization has been proposed by researchers and educators in China and abroad to facilitate students' process of thinking,but it has not been much used in English writing teaching.This thesis aims to find out whether thinking visualization training can effectively improve junior middle school students' English writing ability.Research questions are:1.Can thinking visualization improve junior middle schools students' English writing performance? If yes,which aspect of their writing has been improved significantly?2.Can thinking visualization training positively influence students' attitudes towards the planning process of writing? What are the specific changes?3.To what extent are students' writing problems solved as a result of the training?A class of junior middle school students in Foshan was taken as the participants and 20 weeks' thinking visualization training were carried out.A pre-test and questionnaire 1 were administered for pre-action information before the research,then the first six-week round of action trained students to use listing,one of the thinking visualization tools.Based on the analysis of interview,class observation,reflection was done on the effects of this round.After the modification of the first round,the second six-week training was conducted with the use of outlining.Also based on the analysis of interview,class observation,reflection was done on the second round.After the modification of the second round,the third seven-week training was conducted with the use of concept map..There are also interview,classobservation and reflection.Finally,a post-test and questionnaire 2 were carried out in week 20.After analyzing the results of the writing tests,questionnaires,interviews and class observation,the conclusions are drawn as follows:1.Thinking visualization help improve middle school students' English writing.The improvements specifically lie in students' abundant writing content and fluent organization.2.Thinking visualization training enables students to actively deal with English writing,actively participate in group discussions and confidently express their personal opinions.3.Thinking visualization enables students better grasp the central idea of writing,provides students with progressive motivation to express and specific aids to write smoothly,and improved their writing's coherence as well as planning awareness.This study generates some pedagogical implications for middle schools' English writing teaching,although there are some limitations,it still can be the reference for future research.