An Experimental Study On Using Mind Map To Develop Senior High School Students’ English Skills

Mind mapping is a tool which can guide and extend the thinking process, and also can provide a clear visual expression of it and record it clearly in the process of guiding and extending. While it can help build self-knowledge networks, it is conducive to the communication of knowledge and information between individuals. Based on the high school’s four basic skills teaching methods and with the help of literature research and action research methods, this research tries to apply the mind mapping to the curriculum teaching, to improve the effectiveness of the four basic skills teaching, and to improve the learning level of the students.At the same time, targeted at this teaching method, which is tested as effective, we can make a little contribution to the English teaching field.Through three methods, the author did research on this issue. Documentary method reasonably analyses the scientific theory of the mind map and the possibility of the application of the mind map to teaching. What’s more, it analyses the revelation of the mind map application on the teaching of four skills one by one, providing the theoretical foundation for the issue. Action research method observes the validity of the participation and the efficacy and quality of the language output of the students in class, after the application of the new teaching method. Then according to the observation, adjust the problems in the experiment, thus deciding on the best way of this teaching application. Afterwards, research on the changes in their scores of English texts, and analyses the effectiveness of this mind map application. Survey research method researches on the students’acceptability and likability of this new teaching method through questionnaire and interview after the experiment, after which, sort and analyses the data of the research. All these three methods sustain the conduct of the experiment.The research finds that the application of mind mapping in the teaching of high school English teaching can help stimulate students’interest in reading, and to improve the understanding of the language input and also the language output. Moreover, as an effective means of communication, mind mapping can not only help expand students’ knowledge scale but also help develop the students’critical thinking ability, language ability as well as cooperative learning ability, and finally benefit both the learning and teaching.