Using mind mapping to develop students’ writing skill

Abstract

Brain-friendly teaching aims to find out means to address the human mind and the brain via the known ‘language’. Using images, associations, radiant thinking, and other cognitive funds prove to trigger flawlessly the mental activity and enhance productivity at all levels. Mind Mapping happens to be one of these cognitive means. This study aims at investigating the extent to which Mind Mapping helps to lessen the cognitive demands of the writing task. Besides the cognitive endeavour, it attempts to enhance students’ engagement in the writing process. Hence, it is hypothesized that if second year students at the ENSC used Mind Mapping appropriately as a prewriting strategy, they would write better essays. The theoretical background consists of mind/brain related issues, Mind Mapping’ design and values, and academic writing. The research tools are, basically, Classroom Action Research. In addition to a Students’ Questionnaire and a Teachers’ Survey, there are a Quasi-experiment, where Independent-Samples T-Test and PairedSamples T-Test were used to accounts quantitatively for the findings, the B2- level Cambridge Assessing Writing Performance Checklist (2016), for a qualitative assessment of the writing pieces, and a Padlet to scaffold classroom work. The findings bolstered the positive cognitive and psychological effects of the prewriting technique and the role it played in decreasing the demands of the writing task. More importantly, the treatment upshot a statistical significance of the results obtained buttressed by a qualitative improvement in the Experimental Group’s final drafts. Consequently, the research stressed Brain-based Teaching where autonomy, learning styles and strategies, collaborative learning…etc. were highlighted and, unconditionally, supported with an equal emphasis given to the necessity of training, use, and expansion of the use of this technique to a large scale in the teaching context.