Research On The Application Of Mind Map In Senior Two English Reading Class

English reading occupies an important position in senior high school English teaching.Improving students’ reading comprehension ability and promoting the development of students’ thinking in reading are emphasized in the purposes of English reading teaching.Although teachers have spent a lot of time on English reading teaching,no satisfactory results has been obtained.In order to improve students’ English reading comprehension ability and promote the development of students’ thinking in a real sense,it is urgent for teachers to adjust their teaching methods in English reading.Based on the Theories of Schema,Meaningful Learning,Knowledge Visualization,Constructivism and Cognitive Tool,the author has applied mind map in English reading class,aiming to help students to understand the passage,and trying to reach the goals of improving students’ reading comprehension ability as well as promoting the development of their thinking.Mind map,as a cognitive tool for people to percept the world,is widely used in different fields.It can help people to clarify the logic and transpire thoughts.Because of its advantages,more and more teachers use mind map in English reading class to show students the structure and the logic of the passage,however,the training of students’ ability of making mind map is absent.Therefore,based on these problems in English reading teaching and the advantages of mind map,the author carries out an experiment in senior high school,in order to see whether students can understand the passage better by making their own mind maps,so that to improve their reading comprehension ability and promote the development of their thinking.The development of one’s thinking can be regarded as the development of one’s thinking quality,since thinking quality refers to the ability of thinking that is embodied in thinking’s logicality,criticalness,creativity and so on according to the National English Curriculum Standards.Thinking quality,as one aspect of the “core competence” of English subject,is emphasized in the National English Curriculum Standards,so the research on the application of mind map in English reading class in the perspective of the cultivation of students’ thinking quality is worth doing.The author chooses 64 senior two high school students from science classes in Bachuan New Senior High School as the participants of this four-month experiment since the thinking quality of senior high school students has reached a certain level.To carry out the experiment,the author has read lots of related literatures and introduced some related contents of mind map,reading and thinking quality in the literature review part.And then,the author has used questionnaires,tests,students’ portfolios,classroom observation and interview as the instruments to collect date during the whole experiment.By analyzing the results of this experiment with the help of SPSS,the author has drawn the following conclusions: firstly,the experimental group’s progress of English reading comprehension ability is more obvious than that of the control group according to the analysis of the scores of pre-test and post-test,and with the reference of post-questionnaire.By analyzing the post-questionnaire,most students agree that mind map can help them to improve their English reading comprehension ability.Secondly,according to students’ portfolios which collect students’ assignments of mind map,the author has found that mind map can help students to develop their ability of inducing keywords,and their logical ability of finding hierarchical structures of the passage.Besides,according to the classroom observation,the results of post-questionnaire and the interview,students agree that mind map can help them to develop their thinking,and help them to think logically,systematically,and rigorously by continuing to use it in English reading.Since the time of the experiment is short,this research does not discuss the application of mind map in art classes,and this thesis has not discussed the application of mind map of different article genres,further research is worth doing.