An Experimental Study Of Applying Mind Map To English Grammar Teaching In Senior High School

Language knowledge is one of the six elements of English curriculum content in high school English teaching.Grammar knowledge,as an important part of language knowledge,is also an important basis for language competence.Grammar is essential for language applications and it has always been tested in various national-wide examinations.Both in the 2003 edition and the 2017 edition of Chinese National English Curriculum Standards for general Senior High School students are required to learn grammar knowledge.In addition,the National College Entrance Examination syllabus for 2017 also requires participants to master and use basic grammar knowledge.All these indicate the importance of grammar learning in senior high school.Mind Map is a thinking tool created by British psychologist Tony Buzan in the 1960 s.It presents the hierarchical graphs of themes at all levels by means of pictures and texts.Branches are developed around the middle theme,identified by keywords or graphics,and connected by lines to each level of the theme.In recent years,as a learning method and learning tool,Mind Map has been widely used in the field of education,including English teaching,and it has obtained certain positive results indeed.However,a small number of research achievements have been made on the application of Mind Map in English grammar teaching in senior high school.Therefore,based on the theories of constructivism,knowledge visualization and schema,this study attempts to apply Mind Map to English grammar teaching and aims to explore it as an auxiliary tool whether Mind Map can improve students' English grammar proficiency and interest in learning.In order to verify the effectiveness of the combination of Mind Map and English grammar teaching in senior high school,a 17-week experimental study was conducted in Jiangmen No.1 Middle School,Guangdong Province.In this study,84 students from two parallel classes of senior two in Jiangmen No.1 Middle School were enrolled as the research participants,42 students in the experimental class used Mind Map in their English grammar lessons,while the other 42 students in the control class were instructed by traditional grammar teaching method.Three research instruments were used to collect data in this experimental study: test,questionnaire and interview,and then the data were analyzed by SPSS22.0 software.Based on the analysis results of this experiment,two conclusions were drawn as follows: 1)The application of Mind Map in English grammar teaching can stimulate students' interests in grammar learning.2)The application of Mind Map in English grammar teaching can more effectively improve students' English grammar proficiency.In addition,this study also provides some teaching cases of applying Mind Map to English grammar teaching in senior high school,and puts forward some pedagogical implications,which are useful to provide reference for future teaching and research.