An Empirical Study On The Application Of Mind Mapping To Junior High School Students’ English Writing

In the face of such a crucial issue that both teachers and students are concerned about,they have spent a lot of energy and time on the improvement of English writing teaching,but there are still many problems to be solved.In recent years,the Mind Mapping created by Tony Buzan,a famous British psychologist,has been widely used in different fields of education.From the present studies,the empirical researches of applying Mind Mapping in English teaching mainly attach important to vocabulary,reading or grammar teaching,while few of them are concerned with the specific implementation model of Mind Mapping.Hence,this thesis attempts to apply Mind Mapping to junior high school English writing teaching and combine Mind Mapping with the Process Genre Approach so as to explore a more practical way for teachers to use this tool.This study mainly intends to answer two questions as follow:(1)Compared with the traditional teaching model,how does English writing teaching based on Mind Mapping improve junior high school students’ writing?(2)How does the Mind Mapping technique in English writing teaching arouse students’ writing interest or change students’ attitude to English writing?Accordingly,this study conducted a three-month empirical study in a middle school in Nansha District,Guangzhou.There are 94 participants altogether selected from two parallel classes in Grade Seven.One class is the experimental class and the other is the control class.The experimental class uses Mind Mapping based English writing teaching,while the control class uses traditional English writing teaching.The research instructions include English writing tests,questionnaires and interview.This study used both quantitative research and qualitative research.The final findings can be exactly gained from the comparative analysis of the writing scores,the data of questionnaires before and after the experiment and the interview.The results show that the application of Mind Mapping in English writing can improve students’ English writing performance and the ability of pre-writing planning.It can be seen from the framework of students’ articles that when Mind Mapping and model text analysis are effectively combined,students’ logic thinking can be improved therefore solve the most difficult writing problems for students----what and how to write.Students gradually find the way and experience the fun and significance of writing,so as to arouse students’ interest and enthusiasm in writing.This study has some implications for English writing teaching.At last,the paper also points out the limitations of the research and provides the direction for further research.