The Effect Of Mind Map-based English Reading Teaching On Senior High School Students’ Critical Thinking Ability

National English Curriculum Standard for Common Senior High School(2017Edition)(MOE 2018)lists thinking quality as one of the core competences,requiring to develop students’ critical thinking ability in English teaching.As a visual and graphical representation,mind map can use specific images to organize and express abstract meaning.This process of construction can effectively improve the level of critical thinking.Because of the ignorance of developing high school students’ critical thinking ability,this paper explores the effect of mind map-based English reading teaching on senior high school students’ critical thinking ability.Based on the above background,three research questions are put forward.Firstly,what’s the current level of senior high school students’ critical thinking ability?Secondly,what effects does mind map-based English reading teaching have on senior high school students’ critical thinking ability? Thirdly,why does mind map-based English reading teaching affect senior high school students’ critical thinking ability?An experiment study was carried out to testify the effect of mind map-based English reading teaching on senior high school students’ critical thinking ability.The participants are selected from two parallel classes in a senior high school in DY and there are 50 students in each class.The experiment lasted for 12 weeks.During the experiment,the researcher used the mind map to teach English reading in the experimental class and taught English reading in a traditional way in the controlled class.The research instruments include English reading tests and interview outlines.English reading tests include pre-test and post-test,and the data in the English reading tests were collected and analyzed by SPSS 21.0.Participants of interview are three boys and three girls in the experimental class randomly selected and the conversation was transcribed into text after the interview.The results show that the current level of students’ critical thinking ability is unsatisfactorily low,especially in terms of the ability of evaluation and self-regulation.Besides,the mind map-based English reading teaching has an impact on students’ critical thinking ability on the whole.The mind map-based English reading teaching has greatly positive influence on student’s ability of analysis,evaluation and inference as well as positive impact on students’ ability of interpretation and self-regulation,but no significant impact on students’ ability of explanation.Finally,mind map is helpful to cultivate students’ critical thinking ability because it can help analyze the logical relationship between the various levels of the article and systematically construct the structure and context of the article and colorful activities with the help of mind map such as predicting are conducive to the development of students’ critical thinking ability.But the no significant effect of mind map-based English teaching on students’ ability of explanation is attributed to students’ low language proficiency.The above results confirm that the English reading teaching method based on mind map promotes the critical thinking ability of high school students,and also brings some pedagogical implications for our English reading teaching.Firstly,the cultivation of student’ critical thinking ability should be paid attention to by English teachers.Secondly,mind map can be used as an effective method to develop students’ critical thinking ability.Finally,more tasks on language output should be assigned after class to improve their ability of expression and critical thinking ability.