A Study On The Effect Of Mind Map-based Reading-to-write Teaching On Students' Writing Competence In Senior High School

English writing,as a learning activity to develop and improve students' writing ability,plays an important part in high school English teaching.In recent years,reading-to-write teaching has attracted widespread attention from both research and teachers at home and abroad,which has been proved to be an effective writing teaching method.However,through analyzing students' writings,there are still many problems: in particular,the structures of their writings are not logical enough and some parts of the text are irrelevant to the topic.As a visual representation tool,mind map can help improve students' analytical skills and logical thinking.In the high school English teaching,the research on constructing a mind map-based reading-to-write teaching mode and on exploring its effectiveness is comparatively inadequate.Based on the input hypothesis and output hypothesis,schema theory and constructivist learning theory,the present study constructs a mind map-based reading-to-write teaching model for high school English teaching.By using quantitative analyses,this study aims to investigate the impact of this teaching model on high school students' writing proficiency in terms of content relevance,logical structure and writing strategies.Based on Cohen's(2005)analytic rating rubric,this study tries to explore the following three research questions:(1)What are the effects of mind map-based reading-to-write teaching on students' writing strategies?(2)What are the effects of mind map-based reading-to-write teaching on the logical structure of students' writings?(3)What are the effects of mind map-based reading-to-write teaching on the content relevance of students' writings?The subjects of this study were two parallel intact classes in a high school in Nanjing,Jiangsu Province.The research instruments included two writing tests and one questionnaire.During the three-month experiment,students from the experimental class were required to use mind maps in reading-to-write training,while students from the control class did not use mind maps in reading-to-write training class.The data was analyzed from three aspects: writing strategy used by the students,content relevance of their texts and the logical structure of their texts.Data analysisincluded an independent sample T-test and a paired sample T-test.The results show that:(1)compared with the students from the control class,the students in the experimental class have improved their learning strategies;(2)the students in the experimental class have made great progress in improving the logical structure of their texts,the key indicator of which is their increased and effective use of conjunctives;(3)the content of the experimental class' writings is significantly more relevant to the topics than that of the control class,indicating that the use of mind map is highly correlated with the quality of the content of their writings.From the findings above,some implications can be drawn for foreign language teaching and research.Firstly,teachers should use mind-map strategies in the reading and pre-writing stage.Secondly,teachers should be encouraged to develop their ability to use mind-map strategies and explore as many effective teaching methods as possible.Thirdly,curriculum developers and textbook writers can use mind map to optimize the teaching materials to help students improve their writing ability by using this strategy.