Everything has two sides. Indeed, although most of students showed their positive attitude towards to the use of mind mapping in terms of enhancing motivation, stimulating and facilitating reading comprehension process as well as improving creativity and group work ability, there were still some students who did not really feel interested in mind mapping.
5.2.1. Positive aspects
At the beginning of teaching process, before using the treatment of mind mapping, a great number of students were at low level of reading comprehension ability. They all encountered lots of problems with the reading texts. Their fear about vocabulary, about ideas of the writers and the ambiguity of linking among paragraphs quickly killed their joy in reading lessons. In addition, they used to be in the boring learning atmosphere where they seemed to be alone to solve all the duties in class such as silently reading the text, looking up the new words, managing the time, and deciding for the exercise questions. Therefore, they felt bored with the lessons and were weak in reading comprehension.
However, after learning reading comprehension with mind mapping, there was a dramatical change in the viewpoints of most of students. The positive attitude of students was clearly reflected though their motivation enhancement. Majority of students found the reading lessons more exciting and livelier. They had good chances to engage themselves in reading activities at class and to freely express their ideas.
This could be seen as an extremely good base for students to develop their brainpower and their activeness and confidence. More importantly, plenty of students understood the role of mind mapping in facilitating their reading comprehension process that it helped them easily grasp the content of the text, the coherence of paragraphs as well as the ideas of writers. Therefore, students could remember it longer and easier.
Consequently, students felt more confident and no more anxious about their reading comprehension ability.
Besides, most of students showed their eagerness in participating in the groups and expressing themselves. Through working in groups to create a mind map, they had the good chances to learn from the better ones and in contrast, they could share what they knew for the others. This made the learning process become more meaningful and educational. Accordingly, students recognized that mind mapping stimulated a cooperative learning among them and helped them improve their group work ability.
Making a mind map was not just the activity of listing the key words and main ideas on a blank paper; it was a process of logical thinking in order to choose the best way to present all the core information through suitable pictures, color and key words.
This required the mind map maker to bring into play their creativity. Therefore, learning reading comprehension with mind mapping was not merely a receptive process, but it was also a creative activity to produce a perfect product of mind map which was full of main information of the texts, full of awareness of learners and full of creativity of students. In other words, students recognized that mind mapping helped them much to improve their creativity.
5.2.2. Negative aspects
Beside the positive aspects mentioned in the previous section, mind mapping technique itself still contained some problematic issues when it was applied in the learning and teaching reality. Firstly, the problem of limited vocabulary stock made students feel confused to understand all sentences in the reading text; hence, it caused the difficulties in extracting main points to draw them down into the mind map. Along
with this, vocabulary limitation always blocked students in presenting their opinions in target language when discussing in groups to make a mind map. As a result, majority of students complained that it was hard for ones who had limited vocabulary stock to make an effective mind map.
Secondly, the understanding of a mind map created by another group seemed to be harder than that of one made by our group in which we directly discussed and contributed ourselves to produce. When students in one group tried to create and personalize a mind map, they had their own reason to choose the pictures, the concepts or even the colors for what they wanted to emphasize. Therefore, plenty of students asserted that it might be difficult for those who were not directly in process of making a mind map to understand all the ideas and concepts in it.
Thirdly, the problem of time-taking to construct a completed mind map on the papers was mentioned by most of students. Students desired to present a clear, beautiful and effective mind map to the others; hence, they took much time so as to choose the right images, colors and the way to draw them down most originally.
Consequently, it was time consuming for students to make up a mind map.
Although the above negative aspects partly disturbed students in using mind mapping to achieve the reading comprehension tasks, all in all, mind mapping was a worth application on teaching and learning reading comprehension. It helps students improve their reading comprehension performance as well as change their attitude towards the reading process positively.