A Study On The Application Of Mind Mapping To English Reading Teaching In Junior High School

English reading is one of English language skills,and it’s also an important part of English teaching in junior middle school.Therefore,it is very important to cultivate students’ reading comprehension competence.However,in current English reading teaching in junior middle school,most teachers overemphasize the explanation of the words,phrases and grammatical rules,and the analysis of sentence patterns in a reading passage by translating them into Chinese.The cultivation of students’ using reading strategies and reading methods as well as their overall reading comprehension competence is neglected.So,students passively accept fragmented knowledge while reading without forming a whole picture of the reading material,which leads to their low interest and poor motivation in reading.However,mind mapping,as a powerful graphical representation tool,presents concepts with keywords,lines,graphics and different colors,which can closely link the seemingly disordered reading text information level by level,making each information point become prominent and clear.The use of mind mapping can help solve the dilemma of students’ low participation in class,neglect of discourse structure and lack of reading skills.Therefore,this study attempts to explore how to apply mind mapping to English reading teaching in junior middle school in order to help students build their own understanding system and form effective reading strategies,and then stimulate students’ reading motivation and improve their reading comprehension competence.Through the empirical experiment,the author aims to solve the following three questions: 1)Can the application of mind mapping to English reading teaching in junior middle school enhance students’ reading motivation? if so,is the change significant? 2)Does the application of mind mapping to English reading teaching in junior middle school help to promote the students’ use of reading strategies? If so,is the change significant? 3)Does the application of mind mapping to English reading teaching in junior middle school help to improve students’ reading comprehensioncompetence? If so,is the improvement significant?In this study,87 students from Grade 2 in Santai Foreign Language School were selected as the research objects,among which Class 16(43)is the experimental class and Class 12(44)is the control class.In the control class,the author adopted the PWP teaching mode,without applying mind mapping.In the experimental class,the author also adopted the PWP mode,applying mind mapping during the whole reading process,that is,pr-reading,while-reading and post-reading.The author collected data by using examination paper tests and questionnaires and then analyzed it through SPSS24.0.After the experiment,the author also randomly interviewed 8 students from the experimental class to find out whether the students’ attitudes towards reading had changed,whether they had used some reading strategies while reading,and whether their reading comprehension competence had improved.The results show that: 1)The application of mind mapping to English reading teaching in junior middle school can significantly enhance students’ reading motivation.Students can keep a strong interest in English reading,and are able to face the difficulties in English reading.What’s more,they have a positive and optimistic attitude towards their future English reading;2)The application of mind mapping to English reading teaching in junior middle school can help promote the students’ use of reading strategies.Students can use such strategies as consciously paying attention to the overall structure of reading material,analyzing the general idea of a paragraph,and guessing the author’s intention.They can also use different reading strategies according to different genres of the articles to improve their reading skills and reading comprehension competence;3)The application of mind mapping to English reading teaching in junior middle school is conducive to the improvement of students’ reading comprehension competence,and the effect is remarkable.The students in the experimental class have improved their comprehension ability in understanding the general idea of a paragraph,the main idea of a topic and the judgment of a passage.To sum up,it is effective to apply mind mapping to English reading teaching in junior middle school.However,this study has the limitations of short experimentaltime and limited experimental samples.At last,the author expounds the enlightenment of this study to English teaching in junior middle school,and puts forward some suggestions for the future research.