The Application Of Mind Mapping To English Writing Teaching In Junior Middle School

According to English Curricular Standards in the Phase of Compulsory Education(2011),junior middle school students should be able to achieve comprehensive English abilities through the process of learning.It requires that students should develop the abilities of listening,speaking,reading and writing at the same time.However,the empirical research shows that retelling is a good way to help students improve their comprehensive English abilities in some way,which is also a comprehensive and creative training form plays an important role that cannot be ignored in middle school English teaching.On the other hand,mind mapping was originated in the 1960 s,and it was invented by Tony Buzan.Mind mapping is a visual tool for the knowledge representing.According to the radiant thinking characteristics of the human beings,knowledge is displayed at different levels of different themes,key points and relevance through abundant colors,lines,graphs and so on in a Mind Map.Mind Mapping promotes the understanding and memorizing process of the knowledge.In recent years,scholars have done a lot of research on the retelling and writing from different angles.However,there are relatively few studies related to mind mapping.Based on the study and analysis of English text retelling methods at home and abroad,and the theoretical research status of mind mapping,the author tries to explore a new teaching mode through combining the characteristics of junior middle school students and the theory of Mind Map.Firstly,the author introduces the definition of Mind Map and the current research situation in the related field,expounds the theoretical basis of the mind map and the retelling and writing,then probes into the feasibility of applying the mind mapping to the teaching of English text retelling in junior middle school.Secondly,in order to explore the validity of the Mind Map in text retelling,this study tries to solve the following problems from the contrastive study of the effects of traditional teaching and text retelling in junior middle school English writing: 1)Can Mind Map in the teaching of writing of junior middle school texts arouse students' interest? 2)Can the application of Mind Mapping in the retelling of English texts in junior middle school can improve students' ability in writing and expression?This study takes 100 students of Grade 8 in the Affiliated Middle School of Inner Mongolia Agricultural University as the object of study.Grade 8 Class 7 is traditional teaching class(Control Group)and Class 8 is Mind Map to text retelling class(Experimental Group).Interviews,questionnaires,pre-test and post-test are adopted to collect data.The whole experiment lasts nearly one year.In the process of experiment,pre-writing tests are carried out at first.Then two classes are carried the traditional teaching and mind map to retelling teaching.At the end of the experiment,post-writing tests and questionnaires survey are implemented in the two classes.Finally,the percentage of each option of the questionnaire is input into Excel forms,and the scores are checked by SPSS.22.0.The result shows that the application of Mind Mapping in text retelling can promote students' English expression ability and improve students' English writing level.Furthermore,it can stimulate students' interest.