The Effect Of Graphic Organizers On Students' English Reading Achievements At Junior High School

English reading plays an important role in the field of English language teaching.It is very important for students to master useful reading skills and strategies to facilitate their English reading comprehension.In recent years,researchers Manoli,P.and Papadopoulu,M.have found that graphic organizers,a kind of strategy that organizes and represents information in a graphical form,are conducive to extract and organize information from text so as to facilitate students' understanding of the content and structure of the text.In order to improve junior high school students' English reading achievements,the author conducted a two-month experiment to dig into the following two questions: 1)Will the application of graphic organizers improve junior high school students' English reading achievements? 2)What are the attitudes of junior high school students towards using graphic organizers in English teaching? In this experiment,86 students from two classes of grade nine in Lanzhou No.45 Middle School were selected as participants.In order to test that there is no significant difference in students' English reading achievements of the two classes before the experiment,a pretest was conducted on them.Then,43 students in the experimental class were given an8-week teaching experiment of graphic organizers.After the experiment,two classes were tested on their English reading achievements,and a questionnaire survey was conducted in the experimental class.All the collected data were analyzed by software package SPSS 21.0 and Excel 2010.The results of the research show that application of graphic organizers in English class can,firstly,effectively enhance participants' English reading achievements,Secondly,successfully reduce participants' cognitive burden and greatly change participants' attitudes towards English reading.Therefore,they are very fond of using graphic organizers in English teaching.The above results provide some implications for teachers' teaching and English teacher's researching.In terms of teaching,for different English knowledge modules,teachers should explore effective types of graphic organizers so as to facilitate students' understanding of English knowledge.From the perspective of researching,teachers should enrich the theoretical knowledge of graphic organizers in practical English teaching,and strive to achieve the perfect combination of teaching theories and reading strategies,and thus continuously improve students' English reading achievements.