Influence Of Mind Mapping On English Learning Autonomy In Primary School

Students' autonomous learning has attracted much concern of teachers and scholars since the new curriculum reform.Most existing studies on the cultivation of learning autonomy suggest the methods of interactive teaching,but these methods require high self-discipline of pupils and are not interesting to them.The primary school is a critical period for the development of students' thinking skills.Teachers should create more teaching activities conducive to students' thinking development.As a thinking tool,mind mapping mainly uses color,line,symbol,vocabulary and visual image to present the process of thinking,which is conducive to cultivating learners' thinking skills and knowledge construction ability.This study focuses on the application of mind mapping in teaching,aiming to explore the influence of mind mapping on the pupils' English learning achievements and autonomous learning.Under the guidance of autonomous learning theory and mind mapping theory,this study selected as participants 83 students from two parallel classes of Caiqiao Central Primary School in Yancheng City.The two parallel classes were randomly divided into experimental class and control class.The experimental class adopted mind mapping to assist English teaching and learning,and the control class adopted lecture-based learning.English tests and the autonomous learning questionnaire were used as research instruments to carry out a semester's experimental research.By comparing the English scores of students in the two classes before and after the experiment and the results of the pre-test and post-test questionnaires of students in the experimental class,this study finds that the use of mind mapping not only improves pupils' English learning performance,but also improves pupils' autonomous learning abilities in self-planning,self-monitoring,self-selecting learning strategies,self-regulation and evaluation.In view of the findings of this study,it is suggested that mind mapping should be integrated into the English teaching activities of primary schools as a tool to visualize the brain's thinking process so as to improve teaching effectiveness and students' autonomous learning.