| With the development of the English curriculum reform,it has become more and more important to improve the effectiveness of English teaching and the quality of the classroom.The Mind Map is a kind of radioactive thinking tool to improve the way of information processing and cultivate thinking ability.It can visually display knowledge,logic and thinking.Hence,it is with certain theoretical and practical significance to apply it to English teaching in primary schools.English story retelling is a common activity in primary school English teaching.While retelling,students need to understand the content of the story,sort out the logic of the story,extract key words and phrases,and organize the language.This plays an extremely important role in cultivating students’ English language comprehensive application ability and English thinking ability.But primary school students actually have difficulties in completing this task effectively in the real classroom.In order to promote teaching more effectively for teachers and help students learn English better,the researcher conducted a two-month experiment,in which students from two classes of Grade 3 in Liwan Primary School,Nanshan District,Shenzhen City,were taken as the research objects while questionnaires,tests,experimental teaching method and classroom observation were used as the research methods.In this study,the following two questions are studied and discussed:(1)Will Mind Mapping improve students’ story retelling ability? If yes,to what extent?(2)Will the application of Mind Mapping improve students’ interest in English story retelling? If yes,to what extent?By analyzing the data before and after the experiment,several findings were concluded in the research.First of all,Mind Mapping can help students of Grade 3 improve their oral English story retelling ability.The students in the control class and the experimental class achieved similar results in the pre-test,but the average score of the experimental class in the post-test was2.59184,t=-11.781,p=0.000<0.05,while the post-test score of the control class did not change significantly compared with their pre-test score.Mind mapping can improve students’ oral story retelling ability by helping them locate key words in English stories,clarify the story logic,and achieve better coherence and fluency in retelling.Compared with the pre-test,students in the experimental class improved their score of locating keywords in the post-test by 1.2041,t=-10.329,p<0.05.Their score of story logic increased by 1.6123,t=-14.364,p<0.05.In terms of fluency and coherence,the mean value increased by 0.2449,t=-3.946,p<0.05.However,the average score of students’ pronunciation in the experimental class was reduced by 0.05717,t=5.246,p<0.05.Mind Mapping brought negative effects to pronunciation in story retelling.In terms of grammatical accuracy,the mean value is increased by 0.0408,t=-1.429,p>0.05,which means Mind Mapping did not play a positive role in grammatical accuracy of story retelling.Secondly,the students’ interest in retelling English stories increased after using Mind Mapping.There is more than 80% of the students revealed in the questionnaire that they are likely to use Mind Mapping in story retelling.The data showed in the classroom observation also revealed that students’ interest of retelling story based on Mind Mapping is improved since their active degree increased in participating in various aspects of story retelling activity.In the aspect of students’ active degree of Mind Mapping,t=-8.174,p<0.05.In terms of the active degree of retelling stories,t=-6.895,p<0.05.Being face with students’ active degree of giving comments to their group members’ retelling,t=-2.236,p<0.05.The result of active degree of reorganizing language to retell after comments shows that t=-2.179,p<0.05.All the data showed that,with the progress of the experiment,the students’ active participation in each aspects of story retelling increased,and they showed a higher interest in story retelling based on Mind Mapping. |
