An Experimental Research On The Effects Of The Application Of Mind Mapping On English Reading Comprehension Of Junior Middle School Students

Reading is not only one of the essential ways for students to get information,but also an indispensable way to learn languages.For English reading,it is an important means for students to acquire the knowledge of the English language and develop their English pragmatics competence.It is self-evident that English reading plays a crucial role in English learning.Therefore,English teachers normally pay much attention to the teaching of English reading.However,the result is far from satisfactory even teachers and students devote a lot of efforts to reading.Because most English teachers are consistent in taking the traditional teaching method,which mainly focuses on the instruction of words and grammar.Under that guidance,although students’ English vocabulary has been increased and they can also make English sentences that conform to the rules of grammar,students are lack of interest in English reading and their English reading comprehension cannot be significantly improved.To improve this situation,English teachers have endeavored to apply various teaching methods in reading class and research their teaching effects,such as Scaffolding Instruction,Lexical Approach and Task-based Approach.Besides,the application of Mind Mapping(MM)to the teaching of English reading has also emerged.By accessing to the relevant literature,the author found that a few research on the application of MM to the teaching of English reading had been carried out in junior middle schools.Thus,this research is to investigate the effects of using MM in the teaching of English reading of junior middle schools,especially on students’ interest in English reading and their English reading comprehension.The specific research questions are presented as follows:1.Can the application of Mind Mapping to the teaching of English reading improve junior middle school students’ interest in English reading?2.Can the application of Mind Mapping to the teaching of English reading improve junior middle school students’ English reading comprehension?In this research,100 students of two parallel classes of a high school in Taishan were chosen to participate in the experiment for up to 4 months.The experiment class(EC)was exposed to MM in the teaching of English reading while the control class(CC)adopted the traditional teaching method.The research instruments in this thesis include questionnaires,tests and semi-structured interview.Questionnaires are designed to explore the changes of students’ interest in English reading before and after using MM,in reference to the questionnaire of “Compulsory education English Course Standard(2011)”,FLRAMS(2010)and ERAS(1990).To figure out the changes of students’ English reading comprehension,the data of students’ performance in English reading comprehension(the pre-test and the post-test)were collected.Then,the data were analyzed with the help of the statistical software SPSS 19.Regarding the semi-structured interview,it was used to gain more insightful and reliable information about the changes of students’ interest in English reading and their performance in English reading comprehension.To analyze the data of the interview,NVivo,a qualitative analysis software,was used.The research results show that after applying MM to the teaching of English reading in junior middle schools,students’ interest in English reading has been improved and their English reading comprehension has been enhanced.