A Study On The Application Of Mind Map In English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School

D.K.Willkins,British linguist,once said,“Without grammar very little can be conveyed;Without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed.” However,vocabulary has always been a headache for senior high school English teaching.For this reason,the study brings mind map,proposed by Tony Buzan in 1960 s,into vocabulary teaching.Mind map,a new tool for thinking,makes radioactive thinking tangible.The application of mind map into vocabulary teaching not only draws students’ attention to the key word to be highlighted effectively,but more importantly,allows for thinking in a way of association.Integrating mind map into vocabulary teaching,the paper aims at improving the efficiency of vocabulary teaching,i.e.having a good command of the pronunciation,formation,meaning,and the usage of words,and,at the same time,arousing their interests in memorizing words.Based on constructivism theory,knowledge visualization theory and level-of-processing mode theory,the study has designed the experiment for applying mind map to vocabulary teaching to explore the following three questions:(1)What attitudes do students take towards mind-mapping vocabulary teaching method approach?(2)How to apply mind map into vocabulary teaching?(3)What is the effect of mind-mapping approach to vocabulary teaching?To test the availability of mind-mapping approach in senior high school classroom teaching,the author conducted an experiment in last semester.The experiment participants,with similar academic achievements,come from two classes in the second grade of Xixian No.2 Senior high School.The two classes are divided into experimental class and control class.The experiment lasts one semester,during which,the experimental class uses a well-designed mind-mapping approach designed by the author to teach vocabulary learning,while control class still adopts the school’s conventional vocabulary teaching mode.The experiment result suggests that mind-mapping approach is feasible and available.The findings includes:(1)Mind-mapping approach is popular with students,helping them memorize words effectively in a more vivid way,rousing their interests in learning new words;(2)Mind-mapping approach is productive in teaching the pronunciation,formation,meaning,usage of words,and even in the distinction of varied meanings and syntactic structures;(3)Mind map might be conceived and drawn in term of words features,such as word root,affix,meaning and usage.In this way,connections from words to words are established according to word roots,affixes,word meanings,word formations,etc.,and vocabulary teaching is conducted in the form of map and word to improve students’ vocabulary memory efficiency.Finally,based on the findings of this study,the author gains some enlightenment for vocabulary teaching,such as: when choosing topic words,the difficulty level and content should be considered in terms of students’ competence and the content of textbook.The study expects to offer reference for teachers conducting vocabulary teaching.