A Study On The Influence Of Mind Mapping On Primary School Students' Oral English Output

Language learning requires learners to practice their oral English as much as possible.But nowadays,primary school students'oral English speaking ability is quite weak.Speaking has been ignored and even overwhelmed by other language skills for a long time.As a useful learning tool,mind mapping can help students in activating divergent thinking,and shaping their ideas.There have been many practical studies on using mind mapping in English teaching in China,but they mainly focus on text teaching,vocabulary teaching,writing and so on.Studies on applying mind mapping to help pupils' oral English output are far from enough.Therefore,the author tries to practicing mind mapping in English class in primary school under the guidance of Schema Theory,Input and Output Theory.The author carried out a seventeen-week experiment among students of Grade Five.In this study,students in the experimental class experienced mind mapping method in oral expression,while students in the control class the traditional way.Questionnaire and interview were used in this study too.With the light of Ellis'(2003)oral evaluation system and students' current English level,this study mainly analyzed the fluency and accuracy in students' oral output.Based on the experiment and data analysis,the study has reached the major findings as follows:1)Using mind mapping method cannot significantly improve students'English speaking fluency.However,students' accuracy of oral expression was significantly improved in the experimental class.2)Students from the experimental class got higher scores in speaking than those from the control class.Mind mapping could help make the output more integrate and coherent.3)The learning interest of the students,especially the interest and intention of speaking in English,was greatly improved as well.The study showed that mind mapping stimulated students' existing cognitive structure,and helped them to think in a more effective way.It is feasible and effective for pupils to use mind mapping in speaking English.However,there is still much room for further improvement due to the author's insufficient theoretical knowledge and some other objective factors,such as limited time and samples in the experiment,limited scope of application of mind mapping,etc..It is hoped that the results of this study can be of some use for researchers to carry out future studies in this field.