An Action Research On The Mind-mapping-based English Writing Instruction In Senior High School

English writing is not only an important skill in foreign language learning,but also an important part of language ability.Students' English writing ability can affect their success in their overall language learning.However,the traditional writing teaching mode makes the students who lack vocabulary,writing skills and strategies feel anxious and unconfident in English writing.In the 1960 s,Tony Buzan put forward the mind mapping,which aims at schematizing the thinking process.Mind mapping promotes creative thinking and establishes meaningful connections between thoughts.These characteristics of mind mapping will be of great benefit to English writing.Based on the study of mind mapping and teaching practice at home and abroad,this paper attempts to make use of action research method to apply mind mapping to senior high school English writing teaching with a view to cultivating students' English writing interest and improving their English writing ability.In this action research,120 students are selected as the research subjects,and the students come from two parallel classes,class 9 and class 10,senior one of Guangde XX Middle School in Anhui Province.The action research lasts for the whole academic year of senior one,and consists of two rounds.The teaching material is the Task of 1st-4th module in senior English textbook published by Oxford Yilin press.In this study,research tools like questionnaire,interview,writing test and teaching log are used to collect data,spss19.0 software is used to analyze the data.Quantitative and qualitative analyses are employed to answer the following two research questions.(1)Can mind mapping change students' attitude towards English writing after it is applied to English writing teaching?(2)Can mind mapping improve students' English writing ability after it is applied to English writing teaching?After a one-year action research on English writing teaching in senior high school,through a contrastive analysis of the results of the questionnaire surveys and scores the writing tests before and after the teaching action,the following conclusions are reached:(1)The application of mind mapping can change students' attitude towards writing to a certain extent,arouse their enthusiasm for writing,reduce their writing anxiety,and motivate their interest in writing.(2)The application of mindmapping can improve students' English writing ability.With the help of mind map,students can accumulate writing materials,disassemble and implement writing tasks,and organize effective core information;students' compositions are more rationally and logically structured;their writing scores have been apparently increased;their overall writing capacities have been significantly improved.Finally,based on the results of the study,the writer puts forward some suggestions on improving the writing teaching through effective use of mind mapping.In view of the limitations of this study,some suggestions are put forward for the future research.