An Application Of Mind Map To Junior English Reading Teaching

Reading is a significant part of English teaching in Junior High School as well as one of the important aspects of students’ English learning.However,English teachers of Junior High School often spend most time and effort in explaining new words,word collocations,and sentence-making drills in English teaching.The teachers emphasize on language forms and ignore the students’ understanding of the content so much that it has influenced students’ overall understanding of the author’ s ideas and made the students’ reading ability decline instead of rising.Guided by the constructivism learning theory,this paper puts the mind map,a visualization tool of knowledge representation,into reasonable practice of English reading teaching in the junior high school,trying to find a more effective method in reading teaching.The author selects two parallel classes as the research objects,which come from Grade One of a junior high school in Jinan.The two classes have the same number and the students’ overall levels are not very different.In the eighteen-week experiment study,the author collected a large amount of data and information by means of literature search,questionnaires and teaching experiments.Meanwhile,according to the application of the mind map,the author designed the questionnaire and analyses the results of data.Then the following conclusions are drawn: First,using a mind map for English reading teaching can deepen students’ understanding of the reading materials and improve their reading ability.Second,using a mind map for English reading teaching can improve students’ autonomous learning ability.Third,using a mind map for English reading teaching can improve the students’ interest in reading.The findings of this study help to improve the shortcomings of the current English reading teaching in junior high school and enrich its teaching methods and means.For students,not only is the application of mind map efficient,but also it can arouse their interest and enthusiasm of learning English and improve their reading ability efficiently.In the end,the author puts forward some prospects and suggestions related to the mind mapping in reading teaching.