A Study On The Application Of Concept Maps To EFL Reading Teaching In High School

In America and other European countries, concept maps which are used as strategies of meaningful learning arc studied and applied widespreadly. Concept mapping based on Ausubel's Meaningful Learning Theory is a schematic device for representing a set of concept meanings embedded in a framework of propositions. This study was designed to assess the effectiveness of the concept map as a strategy in the teaching of English reading to Chinese students of Grade Two in No.2 High School of Zhangye. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods were applied in this study, and a comparison between EFL reading teaching in high school with the aid of concept maps and the traditional Grammar-Translation approach was carried out.The subjects of this study were randomly chosen to the two regularly scheduled classes. One was randomly assigned as the experimental class, the other was the controlled one. The teaching approach in the controlled class was the traditional "grammar-translation" mode, and the teacher focused on decoding meaning from the text and required students to translate the text from English to Chinese. While in the experimental class, the teacher guided the students to use a visual approach assisted by the concept map in their reading performance, trying to obtain content integrality of the text. After 5-month experiment, the results showed that: 1) Compared with traditional Grammar-Translation approach, the EFL reading teaching with the aid of the concept map in high school has a more positive effect on enhancing participants' reading proficiency. Concept maps can help teachers to teach the reading tests more effectively. 2) The participants' reading habits with the aid of the concept map were different from the ones without it. Concept maps can help students to read texts more effectively.The thesis is composed of 6 parts. The first part introduces the reason why this study was chosen and its significance. The second part reviews researches on concept maps, covering its definition, its development and some popular software. The third part is the theoretical frameworks of the research and reviews several theories related to this research, i.e. meaningful learning theory, human's memory system, and code broadcasting theory. The fourth part mainly introduces the experimental method, including subjects, instruments, experimental procedure and the data collection. The fifth part analyses data and presents a brief discussion of this study. The last part summarizes and analyses the results of the experiment, including the implication, practical implications and limitations of the study.