Empirical Perspectives on Mind Mapping in English Reading-Writing Teaching in Junior Middle School

In recent years, multi-dimensional English reading-writing teaching activities have received increasing attention from scholars and teachers at home and abroad. As a kind of visual thinking and cognitive tool, mind mapping is also a training method for divergent thinking. However, mind mapping in traditional junior middle school English teaching is mainly applied to a certain lesson and is taught separately, which is not conducive to students to grasp a distinct text structure and form a comprehensive knowledge hierarchy. Based on the input and output theory of second language acquisition, schema theory and knowledge visualization theory, this article tries to incorporate mind mapping with English reading and writing teaching. This research takes Reading and Integrated Skills from the reading materials of Yilin Press for grade-eights as examples, and was carried out for 6 weeks. The subjects of the investigation were 66 students from two regular classes in the eighth grade, of which the control class adopted the traditional teaching method while the experimental class employed the mode of combining reading and writing based on mind mapping. After the test, questionnaires and random interviews were conducted accordingly and the data were analyzed by SPSSAU software. Through the practice of integrating mind mapping with English reading and writing teaching, the multi-dimensional linkage between mind mapping and English reading-writing teaching can advance the shift from extensive reading to intensive writing, enhances integrated linguistic skills for students and provides some insights and suggestions for junior middle school English teaching.