An Empirical Study Of Mind Mapping To Improve Junior High School Students’ Planning Ability In English Writing

English writing plays an important role in junior high school English learning.The English curriculum standards of compulsory education(2022)requires that students should have the ability to collect and prepare materials according to the writing requirements,make a rough draft independently,then polish the first draft and complete the writing task by themselves.During the period of writing,students can use common conjunctions to suggest order and logical relationship,and achieve the goal of meaning coherence.Writing is a way for students to use words to express their thoughts,but the cultivation of English writing ability is a difficult challenge for both teachers and students.Students in junior high schools are troubled by narrow thinking scope,and the essays they write often lack clear logic.At the same time,the traditional teaching methods used by teachers are inefficient.Therefore,the current junior high school English writing class needs more efficient tools.Mind map is an intuitive thinking tool.It turns students’ thoughts into a clear framework in the form of graphs,thus helping students to clarify the layout of paragraphs of an essay.This study decides to apply mind mapping to the teaching of English writing in junior high school and hopes that mind mapping can achieve the following goals: Firstly,by drawing a mind map,students can build a clear framework for their writing,so that they can divide paragraphs according to the content of the essay,the main idea of each paragraph,finally produce an essay with good logical,and thus solve the problems that they can’t write and don’t know how to write;Secondly,students can accumulate a large amount of cohesive words,sort them out,so as to make their essays more cohesive;Thirdly,use of mind mapping can train students to employ divergent thinking,clarify their ideas so as to make their easy thematically richer and richer.In this study,78 students from two parallel classes in Grade 9 of a middle school were taken as the research subjects.The experimental class uses mind mapping to help students to write the essays,while the control class uses traditional writing teaching methods.Tests were conducted before and after the experiment,and the data of the two tests were statistically analyzed by using SPSS 26.0.In addition,the English teachers and students in the involved classes were interviewed and did questionnaires respectively before and after the experiment.Through the interview,we learned about the current teaching situation of English writing in junior high schools and the changes that mind mapping has brought to students’ writing after the experiment.Statistics were made on students’ writing scores before and after the experiment,and the comparative analysis of the scores showed that the use of mind mapping can improve the students’ ability of planning in writing.As a result,this paper believes that mind mapping can help students form clear ideas for their writing,and plan the structure of the essay in a reasonable manner.At the same time,students can use mind mapping to accumulate cohesive words and flexibly apply them in their writing to make the content of their essays more coherent and more logical.