A Study On The Application Of Mind Mapping In English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

In English teaching,the importance of reading teaching is obvious to all.The students’ reading ability directly affects the input and output of the language,which has an important effect on the development of students’ thinking ability and learning quality.Therefore,the improvement of English reading ability always attracts great attention under the background of calling for the cultivation of core competencies of the English subject.However,in the actual reading teaching,the teachers focus on the form of language and mainly interpret the passage in terms of grammar translation method and neglect the comprehension of passage as a whole,which makes the students not understand the passage comprehensively and deeply.Mind mapping,as a visual information expression tool,is widely used in subject teaching and good results have been achieved.Considering the current situation of reading teaching,this study aims to integrate mind mapping into English reading teaching to enhance the effectiveness of teaching.Mind mapping can clearly present complex information in the light of logical diagrams including keywords,colors,curves and other forms which are beneficial to students’ comprehension of the passage.In this study,a total of 95 students in two parallel classes in Grade One from a senior high school were selected as research participants.The experimental class was taught reading via mind mapping,and the control class was taught by the traditional teaching method,and a four-month experiment was carried out.The study attempts to explore the following questions:(1)Can the application of mind mapping improve the students’ English reading comprehension? Which aspects can the students improve most,the understanding of details,making inference,the understanding of the main idea or word and phrase guessing?(2)Can the application of mind mapping improve the students’ reading interest ?(3)What are the students’ attitudes towards mind mapping in reading class? The experiment instruments used in this study are tests,questionnaires and interview.Data statistics and analysis are carried out by SPSS 23 and the study yields the following findings:Firstly,mind mapping used in English reading teaching in senior high school can improve the students’ reading comprehension.And understanding details and understanding main idea are the two aspects of reading comprehension that can be improved most.Secondly,the application of mind mapping can arouse the students’ reading interest.Thirdly,the students have positive attitudes towards the application of mind mapping and they are willing to use mind mapping in the further learning.Hence,it is helpful to adopt mind mapping in English reading teaching in senior high school.For teachers,this is not only an opportunity,but also a challenge.To draw a mind map through software gives a higher requirement to teachers to use the modern educational technology.For students the use of mind mapping leads to their higher level of engagement in class.However,there are some limitations in this study which should be taken into account.The time spent on the experiment is not long enough,the number of participants is just 95,which is not universal,and the types of genre involved are limited.In the further research,we can improve the experiment from the aspects above.At last,recommendations for improvement are made and the author expects the suggestions can provide help for further research.