1 Introduction
1.1 Research background
There are five basis skills in the English language teaching, and they are listening,speaking, reading，writing and translating. As we all know, reading is a basis of learning alanguage，which can improve language competence and deal with information.Reading is an important way to understand and absorb the language information. It cannot only provide students with more abundant learning resources, but also help them tobroaden their horizons, enrich the language knowledge, enlarge their vocabulary andunderstand the society and culture of English speaking countries. In facts，reading is aneffective method for us to explore the complex world, and enlarge our knowledge, which canhelp us to experience the world fully. In fact, reading is an ability to broaden our mind andenlarge our knowledge. Pang et al (2003:6) said “learning to read is an important educationgoal. For both children and adults, the ability to read opens up new worlds and opportunities.，，Therefore, the English examination of the College Entrance Examination stresses theimportance of reading ability. As a matter of fact, reading comprehension scores 40 points,and cloze scores 30 points which usually can be considered as another kind of readingcomprehension in the whole test. And they account together for about 47% of the whole test,so from these figures, we can see the importance of reading to the senior high school students.Reading comprehension is the key to learning English well, which plays the most importantrole in the college entrance examination. There is a wide range of reading material, includingbiography，story, narrative, social culture，cultural knowledge, popular science essay andpractical writing. The quality of reading is not only required to grasp the main facts, but alsorequired a generalization ability to grasp the central idea. In all, it is really difficult for theteachers to guide an effective reading teaching in the senior high school，and for the studentsto gain a high score in this part.
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1.2 Significance of the research
With the development of society and the continuous advancement of teaching reform,people's enthusiasm is increasing in English learning. From the reading comprehensionquestions in the College Entrance Examination, it is not difficult to find higher requirementsfor English reading ability.To evaluate the language proficiency，the ability of reading has always been consideredas an important standard. The college entrance examination reading emphasizes theauthenticity of the text selection. The reading contents of the college entrance examinationhave a large amount of information, and the discourse structure is complex. To examinewhether the students can apply the basic skills of summarization, judgment，and inference, theselection of topics focuses on the details of judgment and understanding, and also paysattention to the overall structure of the reading content. Reading is being regarded as a kind ofcommunication. On the other hand, there is a lifelong effect on readers, and reading canincrease the students' language curiosity and their communicative ability，which are importantfor them to be independent English readers.In terms of the controversial issue，the following researches can benefit the education ofthe high school's English reading.First, the author found easily through questionnaires that the most of the senior highschool students are bored with explaining and translating sentences one by one, explaininggrammar，reciting words in the English reading class. They admitted that grammaticalknowledge was the main purpose of English reading class. In fact, only a small number of thestudents stated that they mastered reading skills.
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2 Literature review
2.1 Definition of Mind Map
Mind Map is originated in the 1970s by the world famous brain-power expert Tony Buzan,which is an expression of Radiant Thinking. It is an effective mode of thinking, which can beused to visualize the whole reading material by using the brain fully. Mind Map can supportlearning and memory activities. Buzan's specific approach and the introduction of the term"mind map" arose in a 1974 BBC TV series he hosted，called Use Your Head, in which，Buzan promoted his conception of radial tree, diagramming key words in a colorful, radiant,tree-like structure. And Mind maps are tools foundation of the human mind. “The subject ofattention is crystallized in a central imagine; The main themes of the subject radiate from thecentral image as braches; Branches comprise a key image or key word printed on anassociated line，topics of lesser importance are also represented as branches form a connectednodal structure." (Buzan, 1993:59-60). There are four essential characters in Mind Map.Figure 2.1 is an example of a mind map.
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2.2 Theoretical basis of Mind Map
Information processing theory compares a man to an information processor which canreceive and process information through the rules of the application of logical strategies, andfinally store the information into our memory and can be retrieved when needed. “Informationprocessing model of memory refers to a framework for describing how different memorysystems sense, rehearse, encode, store, and ultimately retrieve information.” (Barker,2002:346).It is believed by many researchers that our brain can process the raw sensoryinformation and finally transform it into short-term memory shortly. And the information canbe divided into various forms, such as, visual image or the form of sound, through which itcan be memorized for a long time. Mind Map can accelerate the storage of information bycombining the visual image.The information processing theory is developed out of experimental tradition inpsychology in American. Developmental psychologists adopt the information-processingperspective account for mental development in terms of maturational changes in basiccomponents of a child's mind. The theory is based on the idea that humans receive theinformation, and process the information they receive, but merely responding to stimuli. Thisperspective compares the mind to a computer that is responsible for analyzing informationthat we get.The standard information-processing model for mental development convey the fact thatthe mind's machinery contains attention mechanisms for bringing the information in，workingmemory for manipulating information actively，and the long term memory for holding
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3. Research Methodology........ 17
3.1 Research hypotheses........ 17
3.2 Participants........ 17
3.3 Instruments........ 17
3.4 Procedures........ 18
4 Results and discussions........ 23
4.1 Results of interview........ 23
4.2 Results of the questionnmre for students........ 23
4.3 Results of the pre-test and post-test........ 24
4.4 Discussions........ 25
5 Conclusions ........27
5.1 Major findings ........27
5.2 Limitation of the study........ 27
5.3 Suggestions for fiirther study........ 28
4 Results and discussions
4.1 Results of interview
The information the author intended to obtain from the interview was the currentlearning methods in English reading class，and whether the students in EC had someknowledge about Mind Map and their willing to accept new learning methods. Theinformation was translated and analyzed, and from the students' responses and comments, theauthor got a conclusion as follows.First of all, the students' responses to the current English teaching in reading showed thattraditional teaching method was still used widely. Nearly all most of reading lessons weretaught by asking students to read the reading text and then asked them some questionsconcerning the content and gave the answers to them，and then asked the students to readreading text again to find answers which was to solve all the questions in the exercises afterthe text. Though some students admitted that this method was dull and a little boring, theystill believed this kind of teaching method had been widely accepted for a long time.Second, the students' responses also showed that six out of seven students didn't thinkthey like English class. Because most of them were not active in the class，by keeping silentthe whole class and only a few of them would like to speak and response to the teachers.Third, according to the students' attitude towards the Mind Map，it is easy to find thatmost of them have heard of it before，but they haven't got the knowledge of how to use it.In the end，all the students who involved in the implementation stated that they wouldlike to try new learning method in their classes which might raise their interest and creativeability in English.
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Conclusion
According to the experiment on the application of Mind Map in English reading，it iseasy for the author to conclude that Mind Map played a positive role in promoting academicachievement for senior high school students. And the followings are the main finding of theexperiment.The application of Mind Map was proved to be useful and effective in senior high schoolEnglish reading. And this was shown clearly in the improvement of reading proficiency of ECwhich was compared with CC. The significant improvement showed that Mind Map perfectedthe students' reading strategies, such as, scanning，predicting, and analyzing the structure ofthe whole text. The students' creativity can be improved with the help of Mind Map，and theywould make more effort to their English reading learning, besides, their learning performancewould be improved a lot.The findings of the study also show that Mind Map plays important roles in Englishreading teaching. English teachers may instruct students in how to draw their reading mindmaps, which is based on their abundant background knowledge.This study shows clearly that the students come to study English reading activity andbecome more active in the class than before. Besides, Mind Map in reading improves theircreativity and develops their divergent of thinking. What's more, with the help of Mind Map,the students，spatial intelligence improved, which makes them organize knowledge orinformation effectively, and they also can explore the potential of brain in memory. Accordingto LP, the deeper the words are processed, the longer the words are memorized.There are also some unexpected findings from the experiment. Although using MindMap took more time, the students were fond of using it. And their cooperation was improvedin the process of making Mind Map.#p#分页标题#e#
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Reference (omitted)
