3.3.2 Test 6

3.3.3 Interview 7

3.3.4Data analysis 7

3.4 Research Process 7

4. Results and discussion 9

4.1Analysis of the first research question 9

4.2Analysis of the second research question 12

4.3Analysis of the third research question 14

4.4Analysis of the interview 15

5. Conclusion 16

5.1Major findings (and suggestions) 16

5.2Limitations and future expectations 16

References: 17

Appendix I     Pre and post questionnaire 19

Appendix II   Pre-test 21

Appendix III  Post test 25

Appendix IV  Scores of  pre-test and post-test 29

Appendix V  Sample of teaching design 31

1. Introduction

Vocabulary is the backbone of any language and vocabulary teaching is the basic and important part of English teaching in primary school. Over the years, many new techniques to improve vocabulary teaching and new strategies to facilitate vocabulary learning have been explored and testified. At present, there still remain some problems in primary school vocabulary teaching. For students, they still learn new words by rote. Rote learning is boring with low efficiency so that they may generate psychological aversion to English learning. For teachers, they need some new teaching methods to arouse students’ interest. Also it is important to cultivate their self-learning awareness.

Mind mapping has been familiar to many people. It is generally used in many learning areas. The English textbook published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research and adopted by some areas in Zhejiang has a special part for vocabulary accumulation with the help of mind mapping. Besides, mind mapping has been widely used in reading and reading teaching. However, few teachers employ mind mapping in vocabulary teaching class.

Using mind mapping to categorize the words can create a logical and integral word list for students. Also, mind mapping encourages students to use different pictures, lines and colors to learn words. Such vivid learning process could enhance students’ learning motivation. Therefore, it may be a good technique to use mind mapping in vocabulary class.

In this connection, the research aims to investigate the impact of mind mapping on vocabulary proficiency. In literature, some researchers have proved that mind mapping could enhance students’ learning interest and the application of it is testified to improve the vocabulary scores. The research mainly discusses three questions:

(1)Does the application of mind mapping in vocabulary teaching enhance vocabulary proficiency among primary school students?

(2)What influences does mind mapping exert on students’ attitude and behavior?

(3)Is there any different effect from the mind mapping teaching in terms of gender?

The present study could provide a real evidence for the effect of mind mapping on vocabulary learning and teaching. It contributes to first-tier teachers’ vocabulary teaching and students’ effective vocabulary learning.

The paper includes five parts: introduction, literature review, research design, results and discussion and conclusion. The first part consists of the research background, significance and purpose of the study together with lay out of the paper. The second part reviews the definition of mind mapping, vocabulary and previous researches on mind mapping and vocabulary teaching both at home and abroad. Also researches on the application of mind mapping in vocabulary class are used for reference. The third part contains research questions, participants, tools and main research process. The fourth part details the data analysis and discussion of the results. The research questions are verified through the statistics analyzed by SPSS 19.0 from questionnaires, tests and interviews. The final part concludes the major findings, suggestions, present research limitations and future expectations.  

2. Literature review

2.1 Mind mapping

2.1.1 Definition of mind mapping