Research On The Application Of Mind Map In The Teaching Of English Reading In The Second Year Of Junior High School

Mind Mapping was originally invented by British psychologist Tony Buzan.It is a kind of graphic representation and shows people's thinking process logically in the form of a picture.Reading is an important part in both teaching and English learning.Nowadays,many teachers focus on the teaching materials in an excessive way.In their English reading classes,reading materials are regarded as teaching goals,which means they emphasis too much on language knowledge,while ignoring the importance of developing students' thinking and learning abilities.As a result,students are no more interested in English reading.Therefore,a new teaching idea should be applied to English reading teaching to promote students' interests and the abilities on thinking and learning.This study aims to explore the effectiveness of mind mapping in English reading teaching for junior middle school students and to find out whether it make a difference in promoting students' reading interest and their reading comprehension grades.This study mainly discusses the following two questions:1)Can the application of mind mapping to English reading teaching improve students' interest in English reading?2)How to apply the mind mapping to reading teaching to improve students' English and reading comprehension?This study takes information processing theory,visualization theory and constructivism theory as the theoretical basis and adopts the method of experimental research to conduct a 16-week teaching research in Urumqi No.113 Middle School.The subjects of this experimental study are 84 students from two parallel classes in grade eight.In the experimental study,the experimental class used mind mapping to assist English reading teaching,while the control class did not used mind mapping and adopted the traditional reading teaching method.The research tools used in this study include: a questionnaire survey,a test paper before experiment,and a test paper after experiment.The researchers collected and analyzed the pre-and post-test data of the experimental class and the control class.It is found that: 1)The students in the experimental class have improved theirreading motivation and interest after applying the teaching method of mind mapping,while the students in the comparison class using the traditional reading teaching method have not significantly improved their interest.2)After the mind mapping teaching experiment,the post-test scores of the two classes with the same reading comprehension ability are obviously different,which is reflected in the fact that the English reading comprehension scores of the experimental class are obviously higher than those of the control class.Through this experiment,the researcher finds that is is effective to apply mind mapping to English reading teaching in junior middle school.