Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 The Background of the Study
In modern society, people have an increasing demand for English with the boomingdevelopment of social economy and the remarkable improvement of people’s living standard.The number of people who speak English takes up the largest proportion in the world.English is the medium for communication. In English, the four basic skills---listening,speaking, reading and writing are interrelated. People acquire information by listening andreading, and then express their own opinions by speaking and writing.The National English Curriculum states that English teaching should change the currentsituation where English teaching puts much more emphasis on grammatical rules andvocabularies into the practical one where English teaching pays more attention to learners’communicative competence. In order to achieve the goal, teachers should regard English as acommunicative tool and prepare students as much as possible to be able to speak in English bothin the real world and in the classroom.However, in recent years, spoken English isn’t a part of the college entrance exam, andconsequently, it doesn’t arouse teachers’ and learners’ enough attention. Influenced by traditionalteaching approaches, teachers are always lacking in courage to reform teaching method. Lots ofteachers think that training learners’ speaking competence should be in a specialized course andwhat they need to do is only to teach vocabularies and grammatical rules. In the meanwhile,learners lack the motivation to speak English.
......
1.2 The Significance of the Study
The study tends to have both theoretical significance and practical significance. Itspractical significance lies in the fact that there exist many problems in English learning. Firstly,learners don’t realize the importance of speaking and are not interested in English speaking.Many learners think it is very difficult to improve speaking competence. Secondly, manyteachers hold the idea that speaking doesn’t need to be trained because the college entrance examdoesn’t test speaking competence. This research, by applying a mind mapping-based Englishteaching model, tries to develop learners’ creative thinking, and cultivate their interest in Englishspeaking so as to improve their speaking competence. At the same time, for teachers, it canprovide some implications to improve their teaching and ultimately achieve the teachingobjectives defined in the New Curriculum, among which speaking competence is a key one.Besides, the study intends to enrich the theoretical study of Mind-mapping in improving learners’speaking competence situated in English classrooms in China.
......
Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.1 Mind Mapping
Mind Mapping was first proposed at the beginning of 1960s by the famous British brainexpert and educator Tony Buzan，英语论文网站，英语毕业论文，who is a psychologist as well as the Chairman of the BrainFoundation. Tony presented the term of mind map in 1974 BBC’s Use Your Head. In this TVshow, he promoted his conception of radiant, colorful tree which is used to show key wordsand important ideas. Tony thought it was a quite useful instrument and then he used it to trainlearning disabilities and reading abilities. By using mind map, these persons behaved moreoutstandingly than other trainees. The result is that the using of mind map changed thetraditional way of thinking.In
|
