A Study Of Application Of Mind Map To English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

Reading,as one of language skill of English,not only plays an important role in English teaching and learning,but is also vital in the College Entrance Examination.Therefore,it's critical to guarantee English reading teaching effective.However,in the practice of English teaching,there is lack of effective teaching methods and strategies.In fact,as a teaching method and teaching tool,mind map is useful in English reading teaching.Since the mind map was proposed by Tony Buzan in 1970 s,it has been applied in various fields.The purpose of this study is to know current situation of mind map applied in English reading teaching of senior high school.So,it's important to study the effects and problems of mind map in teaching and the effective method of teaching reading with mind map.Three research questions are proposed as follow:(1)What are the teachers' and students' understanding about using mind map?(2)How is mind map applied in English reading teaching?(3)What are the effects of mind map on reading teaching and learning,and what are the problems?With the purpose of answering these three questions,the study is carried out in one senior high school.Thirty-one English teachers and one hundred and twelve students are chosen as research participants.Questionnaire,interview and classroom observation are adopted as research instruments.The questionnaires are adopted from Zhu Lin and Lu Rong's papers,and the questions are modified according to this study.Besides,the interview is adopted from Zhu Lin's paper,and the questions are also modified according to this study.In addition,reliability and validity of teacher's questionnaire and student's questionnaire are respectively tested.What's more,before the survey of questionnaires is conducted,the pilot test is done to check whether the questions in questionnaire are understood by participants,and to check whether participants know how to do questionnaire.The data are keyed into SPSS 20.0.Then five English teachers are interviewed respectively.The interview contents are recorded by cell phone and transcribed into words.Thirty-two English reading classes are observed and the classroom observation scale is filled.Through research,the main findings are summarized as follows.First of all,most of the English teachers would like to apply mind map in their teaching,but only few of them are familiar with the application of mind map.And most of students believe that application of mind map can help them understand the text.Second,only few of teachers and students are good at making mind map.And in order to make reading class effectively,especially for narrative and expositive reading class,mind map can be used to make lesson design,make a brainstorm,show the structure of the text,and make a summary and so on.Third,application of mind map can not only improve the efficiency of reading teaching,but also help students understand the text,make a summary,retell the text,and evoke their interests in reading.However,due to the deficiency of mind map and teachers' weak ability of making mind map,there still are some difficulties of applying mind map in teaching.