An Empirical Study On The Application Of Mind Map To English Reading Teaching In Junior High Schools

English reading is an important part of English learning,which accounts for a sizable proportion in varieties of tests.However,teachers still pay much attention on the explanation of language points and ignore text analysis process and strategy training.Junior high school students have many problems in English reading.For example,they are not interested in English reading,not good at using reading strategies,unable to infer from the context and unable to find the main idea of an article.Therefore,junior high school English teaching needs an effective way to stimulate students' interest and improve students' reading competence.During the process of exploring new methods,scholars at home and abroad have been paid more and more attention to mind map.In fact,results of previous studies have shown that the application of mind map produced a profound influence on English teaching.However,there are relatively few empirical studies on the application of mind map in junior high school English reading teaching.What's more,the conclusions drawn from previous studies are obviously different.Therefore,this thesis aims to explore whether mind map can be used as an effective teaching method to stimulate junior high school students' reading interest and improve their reading competence.Based on learning style,schema and constructivism theory,thisstudy discusses two questions:(1)What effects does the application of mind map have on junior high school students' reading interest?(2)What effects does the application of mind map have on junior high school students' reading competence?To explore the answers to the above mentioned questions,two parallel classes in junior three from TP junior high school were selected.The researcher adopted mind map to assist reading teaching in the experimental class,while used previous reading method in the control class.The researcher used various instruments,including questionnaires,tests to collect data and adopted independent sample T test and paired sample T test to analyze data.The results are summarized as follows:1)Students from the experimental class have improved their reading interest effectively because of the application of mind map in English reading teaching.2)Students from the experimental class have improved their reading competence significantly because of the application of mind map,while students in the control class haven't improved theirs obviously.3)In terms of the ability of understanding detail information,students in the experimental class were apparently better than students in the control class.There was no significant difference between bothclasses concerning the ability of reasoning judgment,guessing word meaning,identifying themes and attitudes.However,there are two main limitations in this research.The experiment lasted 12 weeks,which was relatively short.The sample size is 80,which is not large enough.In order to find a more accurate conclusion,the future research can extend the experiment time and increase the sample size.