Action Research On The Application Of Mind Map To English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

The latest English curriculum standards for senior high school set out new requirements for developing students’ key competences in the English language.The key competences of English include language ability,cultural character,thinking quality and learning ability.In the area of language skills,a “viewing” skill has been added to the four traditional language skills of listening,speaking,reading and writing.The viewing skill requires students to be able to further understand texts by observing the diagrams,symbols and animations,etc.in multimodal discourses.This has placed a higher level of demand on the teaching of English reading in senior high schools.And with the reform of English in the college entrance examination,the scores of English reading-related questions in the college entrance examination have been greatly increased.Therefore English reading is becoming more and more important in the teaching of English in senior high schools.In the high school English classroom,reading teaching often falls into the rut of simply accumulating language knowledge and tends to neglect the understanding of the ideological content and overall structure of the text.As a graphic tool for visualizing abstract thought processes,Mind Map can be used to convey information in various forms,such as lines,colors and symbols.This paper therefore investigates the effects of Mind Map on students’ English reading interest and reading ability by applying Mind Map into high school English reading teaching.This research was conducted through questionnaires,an interview and tests for two rounds of action research over a period of four months with 46 students in senior two class 11 at Mengling Experimental School in Linyi City.This research focused on the following two questions: 1.What are the effects of Mind Map on students’ English reading ability? 2.What are the effects of Mind Map on students’ English reading interest? At last,all the various data collected from the research were analyzed through SPSS 16.0.The author found that Mind Map can be used in the pre-reading,while-reading and post-reading sections of high school English reading teaching,and has a positive effect on activating cultural background,introducing the theme of the text,predicting the content of the text,organizing the structure of the text,grasping key information,retelling the text and imitative writing.In terms of students’ English reading ability,the analysis of pre and post-test scores showed that the application of Mind Map improved students’ scores on all types of English reading questions to varying degrees.And according to the results of questionnaires and the interview,most students have made some great progress in the using of reading strategies and reading comprehension,and students’ reading interest has improved a lot.Therefore,the application of Mind Map in high school English reading teaching can help teachers to improve classroom efficiency,and can also help students to improve their reading ability and reading interest.