On The Application Of Mind Map To English Writing Teaching In Rural Junior Middle Schools

For Chinese students,English writing is one of the difficulties in their English learning,for they don't know how to write and how to organize their writing thought to construct writing scaffolding.It is known that mind map is an effective thinking tool for expressing radiant thinking,and it is good for making scattered knowledge to be intuitive,visible,networking and logical.Therefore,this research tries to apply mind map to English writing,which is expected to improve the students' English writing interest and abilities.The purpose of this study is to answer the following two research questions:(1)Can the mind map approach change the students' attitude towards English writing?(2)Can the mind map approach improve the students' English writing proficiency?In this study,both the qualitative method and the quantitative method is adopted and 90 students of Grade 9 from a rural middle school in the city of Lin Cang,Yunnan province,are chosen as the subjects.The 90 students belong to two classes,each class has 45 students.One class is the experimental class(EC),and another class is the control class(CC).In the process of the experimental teaching,the writer spends 16 weeks in training the EC students' English writing by way of mind map,yet for the students of CC,the writer adopts a traditional way to teach their English writing.Before the experiment,a pre-test of English writing is carried out to prove that the students of EC and CC are of no significant difference in their writing proficiency,and at the same time,a questionnaire survey is conducted to get to know the students' attitude in English writing.After the experiment,a post-test of writingand a post-questionnaire are conducted to investigate into Students' English writing ability's change and their attitudes toward English writing.And meanwhile,interviews are taken for 6 students from EC to further analyzes the change of students' attitude towards English writing by mind map method.After careful analyses of the research results from the tests,questionnaires,and interviews,the major research findings are as follows.(1)From the results of Questionnaire before the experiment,the rate of the students like English writing in EC is 9.8% while in CC is 8.6%,after the experiment the rate in EC increases to 51.4%,but the rate in CC is 33%,which shows that the application of the mind map approach can change the students' attitude towards English writing to a certain degree.(2)The average pre-test scores of EC and CC are 6.3333 and 6.2667 respectively,but the average score of the post-test in EC is 9.5111,and that of the CC is 5.1333.These data show that the experimental class has improved a lot in their writing proficiency,that is,the mind map approach can effectively help the students to construct their writing thought and scaffolding,improving the students' writing proficiency.