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As the important way to acquire knowledge and see outside world, reading is undoubtedly regarded as a vital skill in English learning. Through English reading, students can get the foreign information, know the foreign culture such as literature and custom, and expand the international vision. Thus, reading is increasingly attached great importance in the information age. Nevertheless, according to my survey during the internship in a junior high school, the situation of English reading teaching in junior high school is not a circumstance to satisfactory in China. And there exist some problems as following:
Influencing by traditional teaching method, many teachers always dominate the whole teaching process and regard themselves as the center of the class. They ignore that students are the dominant roles in learning. And their model in teaching reading is just to pour linguistic knowledge into students. It isn’t based on students’ existing background knowledge which does play an important role in building meaning of texts and obtaining the new items. It directly results in the phenomenon that students may lose their interest and have no enthusiasm in engaging themselves in reading. However, we need to realize that students should be the center and teachers should be the guiders who help students become the masters of reading.
The main purposes of teaching reading in junior high school are to enhance students’ understanding and overall grasp of the texts, improve students’ ability to summarize and reproduce the texts. However, most of reading teaching is knowledge-oriented in junior high school. Teachers ask students to read text paragraph by paragraph and make efforts to explain new words and grammar, even translate every passage sentence by sentence in order that students can be able to grasp the meaning of every unit. But they neglect the textual understanding, the activation of background and the cultivation of reading strategies. When communicating with students, they state that English knowledge that is taught in a passage is scattered so that they are confused about the inner connection between them and the cue of the passage. Due to the lack of clear organization of learned knowledge, students can’t understand the overall meaning and purpose of passages, though they know the meaning of every word or sentence. Also, they will forget them after a short period of time. Students may become frustrated when they can’t understand what they read and also become less interested in learning English reading. Thus, how to put scattered knowledge in an appropriate order to help students with understanding and remembering becomes a complicated and vital problem for teachers to solve.
Considering all the problems above, the writer tries to find an effective teaching method of English reading to string the desultory knowledge together which may help students have better understanding of the whole passage and meet the requirements of quality-oriented education to improve students’ reading competence. In the 1970s, Tony Buzan put forward Mind Map theory which is a method of learning, organizing and storing information. A Mind Map is the ultimate organizational thinking tool – the Swiss army knife of the brain (2006). Applying mind maps to English reading teaching in junior high school is beneficial, because it can make the process of thinking more explicit and help students clear their thoughts, think from an overall point of view, develop their pergent thinking and enhance their memory by means of combination between images, words and so on.
1.2 Significance and Purpose of the Study
1.2.1 Significance
With the development of mind maps, we gradually realize that a mind map is a beneficial tool that can help students increase their interest and enhance their reading comprehension ability. And when the writer referred to the previous thesis, she found some researches on mind map practice in the area of English teaching. But the researches on applying mind maps to English reading teaching have not been prevailed in China. The writer tends to do some researches on using mind maps in English reading teaching in junior high school. Through it, the writer wants to arouse more people’s attention about the application of mind maps to English reading teaching in junior high school and promote more scholars and teacher to put their energy into the further study in this field. In this way, researches on mind maps in English reading teaching will be explored in a large scale.