Action Research On The Application Of Mind Map To Improve English Reading Literacy In Senior High School

In daily teaching,the author finds out a problem,that is,students of the senior high school in the author's class are not interested in reading.What's more,few of them feel satisfied after reading or can retell the main idea of the passage after class.Most of them have a low expectation of their reading literacy.Questions above can be included in that students' reading interest,reading attitude and self-assessment are low,which contribute to low reading literacy.However,the new curriculum reform has put forward higher requirements for students' English reading and aims to improve students' reading literacy.At the same time,the reading score in the college entrance examination has been increased;the status of reading teaching is becoming more and more important.Facing the problem of students' low reading literacy,the author has the following hypotheses: the current English reading teaching needs to be improved and reading with the mind map can improve students' reading interest,reading attitude and self-assessment.To test the hypotheses,the author adopts the questionnaire mainly adjusted from Wang(2005)and interview research on students.The current reading teaching has the following questions:1.The initiative of students is ignored and teachers instruct too much;2.Too much Emphasis on vocabulary knowledge teaching and the text structure is ignored;3.Too much attention is paid to the meaning of the sentences and the main idea of the passage is ignored.The result of the questionnaire and interview shows that students are not satisfied with the passive way of reading and willing to try to read with the mind map.Besides,the author does a literature review on reading literacy and mind map,which is a powerful thinking tool to organize knowledge.Based on the theory of constructivism,knowledge visualization theory and theory of left and right brain theory,mind map can achieve knowledge visualization and mobilize the initiative of students.With the use of text,image and color,students can coordinate the left and right brain functions.What's more,it can contact the students' existing knowledge to construct new knowledge system and promote the students to understand the structure of the article.Wang Qiang defines that foreign language reading literacy is consisted with "reading ability" and "reading character",foreign language reading character contains the reading habits and reading experience which includes reading interest,reading attitudeand self-assessment.Studies have shown that reading attitude,reading interest and selfassessment have a positive predictive effect on students' reading literacy,but they do not show how to improve these three dimensions.This paper uses the concept of Wang Qiang,to test the reading literacy assessment from reading interest,students' reading attitude and self-assessment with the help of mind map.Based on the previous research,the author summarizes the problems into the following ones.1.Can the mind map improve the students' reading literacy?2.How to use the mind map to improve student's reading literacy?3.What is the effectiveness of the mind map in the improvement of senior high school students' reading attitude,reading interest and self-assessment?The author adopts 16 weeks action research in a senior high school class of X Middle School in Gan Zhou city,63 students of which are the subjects.As to research tool,the adapted questionnaire refers to Wang(2015),Liao(2013)and Zhang(2005)to follow students' changes in four dimensions,that is,mind map,reading interest,reading attitude and self-assessment.At the same time,four monthly tests are adopted to follow their reading achievement.In the first round of action research,students will be encouraged to use mind map to do brain storm before reading,which can link their acquired knowledge with the new one.Then,they are encouraged to draw the structure of the passage with mind map while reading.At last,they will retell the passage by using of mind map.With the help of questionnaires and interviews,in the first round of action research,the author finds out that under-achievers have limited vocabularies to finish the mind map and some students fail to summarize the main opinions of the passage and present it on the mind map in an organized way.After reflection and adjustment,the author adopts the second round of action research,during which,students were asked to work as a group to finish the mind map and then show the good mind map works in front of the class,which can provide help to the under-achievers and set a neat standard and sample for students to follow.At the same time,interviews,stage tests are used to track changes in the students' reading interest,reading attitude and self-assessment.The author observes that the students are more active in reading class.After that,the post-questionnaire and periodtests are delivered to students to check the students' reading interest,reading attitude and self-assessment.The results of the questionnaires is that the measured variables T test is significant in the reading attitude,reading interest and self-assessment,and the values of P were smaller than 0.05,which shows that there is a significant increase on the reading attitude,reading interest and self-assessment with the help of mind map.The analysis of the results of the tests showed that the scores in the third and fourth tests were significantly improved compared with the first time(p<.001),and the scores in the fourth examination were significantly higher than those in the second times(p<.001)and third times(p=.074).The analysis of the tests shows that the scores in the third and fourth tests have significantly improved compared to the first and second test,which shows that the reading scores of the target students has improved after reading with the mind map.At last,the author can safely conclude that the application of mind map in English reading can improve the reading Literacy of senior high school students.