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

Mind mapping is a visual tool to represent knowledge and the natural thinking process and it enables learners to combine abstract thinking and image thinking to visualize the thinking and to show the various themes and their internal connections.Previous scholars have proved that mind mapping is a useful learning too in their researches.However,they have applied it in some areas like writing and reading,some applied mind mapping in primary school and middle school,but relatively,few of them do researches in vocabulary and in senior high school.Based on the theory of mind mapping,the author applies it to English class teaching in senior high school to improve students' vocabulary competency.In this thesis,the researcher aims to explore three questions:(1)What's the effect of the application of mind mapping on students' vocabulary size?(2)What's the effect of the application of mind mapping on students' vocabulary accuracy?(3)Can the application of mind mapping help students develop good memorizing habits?To begin with,the author first introduces the background knowledge and some related researches at home and abroad.After combining mind mapping,English vocabulary map and English teaching,the author determines the framework of this research.The teaching experiment lasts two months,and fifty students in Class Seven in the affiliated middle school of Northwest A&F University are chosen as the experimental subjects while 50 students in Class Eight as the comparison subjects.The author uses the experimental method as the research methods.Based on the research data,the author tries to study the role of English vocabulary map in high school English vocabulary teaching.By adopting by SPSS 21.0,the author analyzes the results of all the tests and questionnaires and concludes the following findings:(1)The application of English vocabulary mapping can help students enlarge their vocabulary.The results prove that English vocabulary map is a very effective cognitive tool to help students memorize more vocabulary;(2)The application of English vocabulary mapping can improve students' vocabulary accuracy.Vocabulary maps can be used as a visual tool to help students connect more correlative words so that students can organize their vocabulary network;(3)The application of English vocabulary mapping can help students develop good habits of reading,allowing students to be more proactive in remembering words and gaining a sense of accomplishment inlearning.Applying mind mapping in vocabulary teaching in senior high school is feasible and effective,which will does great help to teachers' teaching and students' learning.And the ways of drawing mind maps can be varied with the update of the modern science and technology.After deriving the results of the experiment,the author also pointed out some problems of this study,such as the author only selected 100 students in Grade One as the research subjects and the evaluation method need to be further optimized.In the meanwhile,the author proposed several prospects for future research.