Application Of Concept Mapping In Teaching Rural Junior Middle School English Reading

With the development of educational reformation,the new English curriculum standard proposes new requirements for English reading in China.Problems on English reading still existed in the current junior middle school English teaching.Concept mapping,put forward by Novak in 1960s,is believed to be a useful tool for organizing and representing knowledge.It is a kind of spatial network structure diagram that shows the definition connection between concepts in the form of a scientific proposition and illustrates with concrete examples,so as to organically connect all basic concepts.But,to date,only a few studies have been conducted on the application of concept mapping into English teaching in China.This study aims to explore the effects of the application of concept mapping in rural junior middle school English reading teaching.Specifically,it mainly answers the following questions:1.What effect does the application of concept mapping have on reading comprehension of rural junior middle school students?2.What effect does the application of concept mapping have on reading comprehension of higher-achievers and lower-achievers in a rural junior middle school?The 91 participants selected from a rural junior middle school were divided into two groups,one experimental group of 46 students and one control group of 45 students.In the experimental group,teachers guided the students to use concept mapping for English reading teaching and draw concept mapping for reading,while in the control group,teachers used the traditional grammar translation method for English reading teaching.Through the experimental study,the major findings are presented as follows:First,the application of concept mapping can improve English reading comprehension of rural junior middle school students.Concept mapping can help students have a systematic understanding of English reading and improve their cognitive structure.Through the integration of new and old knowledge and the construction of knowledge network diagram,students can grasp the knowledge as a whole and improve their interest in English reading.At the same time,the new concepts are integrated into the relevant prior knowledge schema in the form of visual schema.Second,the application of concept mapping had a certain impact on reading comprehension of students with different learning levels.In the process of data collection,we could see that the lower-achievers had a faster improvement than the higher-achievers.