A Study On The Application Of Three Types Of Mind Maps To English Vocabulary Teaching In A Junior Middle School

The importance of vocabulary in English language is self-evident.It is a prerequisite for comprehensively improving students’ listening,speaking,reading,writing and other abilities.Although middle school students and teachers pay much attention to vocabulary learning,the results are still not satisfactory.Probably,what the students lack is an effective method to have a good command of English vocabulary,while mind mapping,can just assist students to review and construct knowledge effectively by using colors,codes and images.In order to improve the vocabulary learning abilities of middle school students,the author takes mind mapping as a teaching method and conducts an empirical research on it,aiming at exploring the following issues: 1)What changes have taken place in terms of the students’ attitude towards vocabulary learning after the implementation of mind mapping? 2)Which type of mind mapping is more conducive to the learning and memory of junior middle school students’ English vocabulary? 3)Can mind mapping improve junior middle school students’ vocabulary learning achievement?The research subjects of this study are 86 Grade Eight students from a junior middle school in Jingzhou,Hubei Province.The author selects Class One as the control group(CG)and Class Two as the experimental group(EG).The former uses traditional teaching method,while the latter adopts mind mapping for vocabulary teaching.Before the experiment,the author conducted a questionnaire and pre-test in the two groups,in order to understand students’ attitude towards vocabulary learning and their vocabulary learning achievement.After the experiment,the author conducted a questionnaire in EG and a vocabulary test on the two groups,aiming at understanding the changes of vocabulary learning attitude and achievement about the students.Finally,SPSS21 was utilized to analyze the data from the experiment.The results show that: 1)Mind mapping changes the students attitude towards vocabulary learning from negative to positive.2)Each mind map can promote short-term memory as well as long-term memory of new words in varying degrees.Most students think context-based mind mapping is better for memorizing and learning words.3)The vocabulary scores of post-test in EG has greatly improved compared with that in CG.These show that mind mapping plays a positive role in vocabulary teaching in junior middle school English learning.This study provides a feasible method for the teaching and learning of English vocabulary.According to the research,it can not only stimulate students’ vocabulary learning interest,but also improve their vocabulary learning abilities.At the same time,the study gives some suggestions for junior middle school English teachers to solve vocabulary teaching problems.