The Application Of Mind Mapping To English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

English writing is a kind of comprehensive thinking activity,which reflects students' mastering of vocabulary,grammar and other knowledge of language,students' abilities of analytical thinking,words organizing,language expression and their mastering of various writing styles.Therefore,English writing is an important part of language use and is critical to improving the English comprehensive ability of Senior High School students.However,the present situation of English writing in Senior High School is not that satisfactory.Many teachers still adopt the traditional methods in teaching writing lessons.The boredom of this type of teaching and defects in the system of evaluation don't actually stimulate students' desire of writing,whereas students have showed various feelings towards English writing,such as lack of interest and confidence,unwilling to write and fear of its difficulty.All these lead to low scores.Hence how to effectively improve Senior High School students' ability in writing and how to solve the problems in the writing process become those of the educators' continuous exploration.Mind Mapping was proposed by Tony Buzan in the 1960 s.It is a kind of visualized thinking tool which displays knowledge hierarchically according to different themes,emphasized points,relevance,etc,in the form of pictures using various colors,lines,graphs or other things.It is based on the characteristics of the human beings' radiant thinking modes.Mind Mapping also helps in selecting,classifying and organizing information and at the same time building up connections among information,which are beneficial for students to finish writing tasks.This thesis tries to conduct empirical study on English writingteaching based on Mind Mapping and under the guidance of the theories of brain science theory,constructivism and knowledge visualization theory.It aims to find out whether students' interest in English writing and their writing ability could be improved and the feasibility of applying Mind Mapping in English writing teaching in Senior High School.Eventually it tries to prove that Mind Mapping can solve the problems that exist in the writing process and can promote teachers' teaching as well.This research mainly deals with two questions.Firstly,can the application of Mind Mapping arouse students' interest in English writing?Secondly,can the application of Mind Mapping improve students' writing ability?90 students from two classes of liberal arts of Grade Three in Yiqi Senior High School will be regarded as the subjects of the research.The English levels of these two classes are similar.During the experiment,one class is chosen randomly as the Experimental Class with Mind Mapping teaching model applied to English writing and the other as the Control Class with the traditional teaching method.The experiment will last for one semester.Three kinds of instruments will be employed to conduct the research,that is questionnaires,an interview,and writing tests.Meanwhile,data will be collected before and after the experiment and finally analyzed through the tool SPSS 24.0.The results show that by using Mind Mapping,the students' radiant thinking and creativity are inspired so that the students show great interest in the English writing and their attitudes towards English writing have changed greatly.What's more,compared to the traditional methods of writing teaching,drawing mind maps broadens and widens students' thoughts while writing.Moreover,it can also provide writing materials and structures which lead to improvement in students' writing ability.In conclusion,this new model can arouse students' interest in writing and improve their writing levels.So it can be effectively applied in the English writing teaching in Senior High School.