An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Concept Map On High School Students’ English Summary Writing

Concept map,known as a knowledge visualization tool,is often used to comb the content,organize language and clarify the structure in reading and writing process.To compose a summary writing,students should use their own language to summarize the key points of the source text precisely and coherently.However,in practice,senior high school students have problems with the content,language and cohesion and coherence in summary writing,and there are differences in summary writing performance among students with different English proficiency.Therefore,in order to explore the impacts of concept map on high school students’ summary writing performance,based on the framework of the Scheme Theory,Knowledge Visualization Theory and Ausubel’s Meaningful Learning Theory,this research attempts to regard concept map as a strategy of summary writing and investigate the following research questions: 1)What effects does concept map have on different-English-level students’ total score in summary writing? 2)What effects does concept map have on different-English-level students’ content fidelity in summary writing? 3)What effects does concept map have on differentEnglish-level students’ language score in summary writing? 4)What effects does concept map have on different-English-level students’ cohesion and coherence in summary writing?Experimental research was adopted in this research.It was a quasi-experiment with the design of 2(group: experimental class,control class)*3(English proficiency: highlevel group,mid-level group,low-level group)*3(test: pre-test,post-test,delayed posttest).The irrelevant variables such as the number of students,their age and gender,the extra-curriculum tutoring,the initial English proficiency and the teacher in experimental class and control class were strictly controlled.Summary writing test was used as the instrument.Eighty students from two natural classes with similar conditions in a high school in Qingdao were selected as subjects.The control class was taught summary writing with traditional method,while the experimental class used concept map to organize summary writing.To further explore the effects of concept map on differentEnglish-level students’ summary writing performance,all students were divided into high-level,mid-level and low-level groups according to their English proficiency.The experimental teaching lasted twelve weeks,with pre-test,post-test and delayed post-test carried out in week 1,week 12 and the fourth week after the experimental teaching.Test results were imported into SPSS 26.0 to run the Generalized Estimating Equations,which could reflect the changes of students’ summary writing performance.By analyzing the data and discussing the results based on previous literature,pedagogical suggestions for adopting concept map in summary writing were propounded.The research results indicate the following findings.1)Concept map has significant impacts on high school students’ summary writing total score.There are significant immediate and delayed effects on high-level students’ and significant delayed effects on low-level students’ total score.2)Concept map has significant impacts on the content fidelity.For high-level students,concept map has significant immediate and delayed effects,while for low-level students,it has significant delayed effects.3)Concept map has insignificant effects on the language scores in summary writing.It has significant delayed effects on high-level and low-level students.Specifically,in language independence,concept map has significant immediate effects on mid-level students,and it has significant delayed effects on students at every English level;in linguistic accuracy of summary writing,concept map has insignificant immediate effects and delayed effects on all-level students.4)Concept map has insignificant effects on the cohesion and coherence in summary writing.It only has significant delayed effects on low-level students’ cohesion and coherence.Based on research results and previous literature,suggestions are put forward.Teachers are supposed to 1)apply differential teaching to accordingly give intervention to different-English-level students so that the effects of concept map on summary writing can be maximized for students with different English proficiency,2)use some knowledge visualization tools or multi-model means like concept map to activate students’ previous schemas so that they can better understand the topic of summary writing,3)lead students to transfer the concept map strategy in memorizing linguistic knowledge to provide a basis for summary writing,4)help students improve the discourse competence by using concept map to clarify the structure and logic of the source text.There are some limitations like a relatively short research period and a small experimental sample,the thesis still has implications for improving the summary writing performance of students with different English proficiency.It also provides a practical basis for future study.