The Effect of Using Electronic Mind Mapping on Developing First Secondary Stage Students' EFL Critical Reading Skills

Abstract

Teaching reading in EFL classroom concentrates on cognitive strategies such as memorization through traditional teacher-centered practices where students listen to the teacher explaining and decoding the text word by word. Traditional reading practices can’t stimulate students to read critically, but they manage students to literally and partially comprehend the text. However, enabling students to read critically can be improved through the effective use of the interactive visual thinking strategies. Using visual thinking strategies in a web–based environment helps EFL students develop critical reading skills and promotes their engagement and interactivity in the learning process. Additionally, electronic mind mapping as a visual web-based strategy, has a great influence on developing critical reading for the following reasons: 1. The interactivity of Hyperlinks (by a click on a linked word or image, students are able to access another new screen) helps the reader to be interactive, navigator, protagonist, explorer, able to build a dialogue with what he reads. 2. Multimodality in displaying information through using visual and verbal representations, text, picture, sound, video, graphic, and animations improve critical reading skills. 3. Some factors such as colors, codes, space, size, and nonlinearity facilitate learning to use the foreign language and develop the critical reading skills. Therefore, educators should make use of electronic mind mapping as a teaching and learning strategy. As it helps EFL learners personalize and stimulate uniqueness, access information, create more cognitive associations, explore their knowledge, modify easily as they organize, reorganize and filter the thoughts, represent visually their ideas, and express their thoughts in a nonlinear way. In addition, it represents a bridge which - 140 - links the target language to the native language. Besides, in order to create their own mind maps, not simply looking at one created by the instructor, students are engaged in active learning as they generate ideas, discover associations, and formulate categories. Accordingly, electronic mind mapping is a a digital visual thinking strategy that helps learners improve critical reading skills. Statement of the problem First year secondary stage students lack the ability to read critically. So, there is a need to develop their critical reading skills. Therefore, the researcher investigated the effect of using the electronic mind mapping on developing first secondary stage students' critical reading skills. Research Questions The following questions need to be answered: 1. What are the critical reading skills necessary for 1st year secondary stage students? 2. What is the suggested program based on using the electronic mind mapping program to develop the identified 1st year secondary students' critical reading skills? 3. What is the effect of using electronic mind mapping on developing first year secondary stage students' critical reading skills? Hypotheses of the study Therefore, the present study verified the following hypotheses: 1. There is a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the group of the experiment on the critical reading test in overall critical reading skills in favor of the post-test mean score. 2. There are statistically significant differences between the mean scores of the group of the experiment on the critical reading test in each critical reading skill in favor of the post-test mean scores. Moreover, the present study adopted the one group pre-posttest design, the critical reading skills appropriate to the first year secondary stage