Effectiveness Of Mind Mapping In English Reading Teaching In Junior High School

Reading is an important means of language input.In English teaching,reading is one of the most important ways for learners to acquire language knowledge and improve their learning ability.National English Curriculum Standards for Nine-Year Compulsory Education(2011)not only focuses on the improvement of junior high school students' reading ability,but also on the cultivation of their reading quality.In addition,reading affects the improvement of students' listening,speaking and writing abilities as well.Therefore,reading is a very important step for junior high school students to learn English.Mind Mapping is a psychological concept put forward by British scholar Tony Buzan in the 1960 s.It helps people form a systematic and visual knowledge framework,deepen their understanding and cultivate divergent thinking ability by organically combining elements such as graphics,key words and colors.The theory was then widely used in various fields.In teaching,Mind Mapping can make complex reading materials present in a focused and clear form.For a long time,there are many research results on Mind Mapping in academic circles,but the researches are more theoretical,and the discussion combined with class teaching practice still needs to be further explored.At the same time,the current English reading teaching still has the phenomenon of paying more attention to the teaching of vocabulary and grammar than to the cultivation of reading ability,which leads to the loss of enthusiasm and interest of some students in English to some extent.Therefore,the author attempts to study the application of Mind Mapping in English reading teaching in junior high school,aiming to answer the following three questions:(1)What are the changes of the students' interest in English reading when Mind Mapping is applied in junior high school?(2)What influence does Mind Mapping have on the students' reading comprehension ability when Mind Mapping is applied in junior high school?(3)What influence does Mind Mapping have on the students' creative thinking ability when Mind Mapping is applied in junior high school?The author chooses two parallel classes of Grade Nine in Xinyang No.9 Junior High School as the research object.Under the guidance of brain science theory,multipleintelligence theory,knowledge visualization theory and schema theory,the author collects the data by questionnaires,tests of English reading comprehension and interviews,and analyzes the data with SPSS 20 software.The results show that the application of Mind Mapping in English reading teaching in junior high school can stimulate students' interest in English reading,deepen their understanding of reading materials,and improve the efficiency of English reading teaching,which proves the feasibility and effectiveness of Mind Mapping in English reading teaching in junior high school to some extent.