Abstract:

Although graphic strategies, such as graphic organizers and concept mapping, have been validated to be helpful for reading comprehension improvement in many researches, finding out the suitable graphic strategy for improving argumentative essay reading comprehension ability is still the interesting topic to be researched.

Therefore, this paper designs three reading approaches：
(1) traditional teaching approach without graphic strategy,
(2) concept mapping and
(3) argument mapping for students.

By applying the proposed approaches to students during their argumentative essay reading, we can find out which graphic strategy really improves reading comprehension ability for students. The experiment has been held for one semester and experimental results from 373 sixth grade students in 14 classes in the elementary school of Taiwan showed that the argumentative essay reading comprehension ability of argument mapping group(124 students) could be enhanced when compared to the traditional (112 students) and concept mapping (138 students) group.

Keywords:

Argument mapping, Graphic organization, Reading comprehension, Argumentative essay.