Cultivating Students' Writing Ability With Mind-Map Drawing Skills

As a significant part of English teaching in junior middle schools,English writing is interdependent on yet interrelated with other skills of English language such as listening,speaking,and reading.It is not only enlisted among the English basic skills required of the students but also as a reliable indicator for their overall ability of English use.Unfortunately,in some rural middle schools,although a lot of time and energy have been spent by both teachers and students on English writing,the students' English writing ability turns out to be rather weak.This has been a huge discouragement to teachers and students who are seriously concerned with the outcome of their efforts.As a result,many teachers ignore the cultivation of students' English writing ability intentionally or unintentionally,and students tend most likely to ignore their development of writing ability or even refuse to render more efforts for this purpose.The author believes that the causes behind this phenomenon are manifold.On the one hand,the students lack a due foundation in English because English was not offered as a course when they were pupils in primary schools.But now they are required to learn a lot besides the heavy burden of vocabulary acquisition,let alone the impossible task to develop their writing ability in a short period of time.On the other hand,the teachers could do very little to help their students even though they wish to when they are confronted with a heavy workload and a limited time for the task of teaching writing.With a universal panic for writing among the students,it becomes self-evident and even urgent to look for effective ways to help improve the students' writing ability.The teachers should help their students to know how to write and what to write through a conscientious guidance and a systematic training of know-hows,and even to improve their confidence for writing in the first place.Mind maps provide a visual graphical means for human organization and expression of divergent thinking modes.Complex and abstract problems are simplified and restructured to reveal the thinking process in a vivid manner.At present,many scholars in China have studied application prospects of mind maps in the teaching practice of primary and secondary schools,such as strategy training for vocabulary memory,method training for English reading,training of English listening skills and so on.Persuasive experiments are still rare,however,in the application of mind maps to effectively guide rural students' English thinking process and systematically train their written expression skills.Effective experiments on writing reform that have been widely recognized by the great majority of English teachers in middle schools are rarely reported.The author attempts to carry out an experiment on the teaching of English writing,therefore,with a joint help of theories developed in different fields such as brain science,knowledge visualization,constructivism and information processing.Her purpose is to address the following three questions by uniting the mind-map drawing skills with the rural junior middle school English writing practice.1.Is the application of mind-map drawing skills necessary to the teaching of English writing in middle schools?2.Can the application of mind-map drawing skills improve students' English writing interest in rural middle schools?3.Can the application of mind-map drawing skills improve students' achievements in English writing?The author conducted a four-month experiment with 90 students from two classes in the eighth grade of the same language proficiency with the help of tests,questionnaire and interviews.Before the experiment,a questionnaire survey and a writing test were done for the experimental class and the control class respectively and the results showed that most students were not familiar with mind-map drawing skills,most students achieved poor grades in writing,and held a strong dislike and fear for it.Before the experiment she made an extensive reading of literature for an informed choice of mind-map drawing methods that might go with the age and intelligence of the students.Then she started the application of skills for mind-map drawing and requires the experimental students to strictly follow their reviewed and revised maps while the same old way is applied to the controlled class.After the teaching experiment,statistics and analyses of the experiment indicate that the students in the experimental class have changed in the following aspects: the English composition scores of the experimental class are significantly higher than those of the controlled class.When the fears are removed,the students become better at using maps and receive better scores for their writings,and more significantly their practical skills for drawing maps are significantly improved.The results show that this auxiliary tool of thinking mode does help the students to do regular brain-storming,to recall familiar texts and contexts,and to make sensitive use of their active words and structural patterns for an expression of their thoughts.To sum up,this well-planned training results in a more frequent use of words and structures that have been acquired by the students in proper writing contexts,and consequently a more balanced improvement in their interest,confidence,and capacity for English writing as a whole.