The Impact of Mind Mapping Strategy on Vocabulary Use in the Writing of Iranian EFL Learners

This study was conducted to investigate the effect of mind mapping strategy on vocabulary use in the writings of Iranian EFL learners. To this end, sixty pre-intermediate female students from two intact classes were selected from an English Language Institute in Ardakan, Yazd, Iran. An experimental method was undertaken and the participants were divided to two groups. Thirty-one students were taken as the experimental group. They were subjected to treatment, in which vocabulary selection through sentence-making rules were taught by the application of mind mapping strategy. Twenty-nine students in the control group were taught through the traditional method. At the end of instructions to both groups, the results of the post- test obtained through the SPSS software showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group. In order to confirm the principles of the ‘noticing hypothesis’ the results of a delayed post-test conducted after a month revealed that the long term effect of the mind mapping strategy was significantly effective in the improvement of vocabulary used in writing tasks of EFL learners participating in the experimental group. One important pedagogical implication of this study is that with a greater focus mind mapping strategy of vocabulary can be very effective in teaching writing especially for EFL students even at the pre-intermediate levels.