Application Of Imitation Writing To High School English Writing Teaching: From The Perspective Of Memetics

Due to the reformation of the new College Entrance Examination,the proportion of English writing in the examination increases with more comprehensive examination dimensions,which certainly pose greater challenges to the teaching and learning of English writing.Meanwhile,in the present writing practice in high school,students encounter certain writing difficulties and experience some extent of writing anxiety,which hinder students from enhancing their writing proficiency.Although many an English teacher has initiated experiments in new writing teaching methods after the new English Curriculum Standards was published,the results of writing teaching do not seem desirable owing to the immature new writing teaching methods and the traditional methods dominating the writing class.In order to solve the above challenges and problems,the theory of memetics is applied to English writing teaching in this study.If a piece of information is capable of being duplicated by imitation,it is deemed as a meme.A meme is duplicated successfully on condition that it has the competence in proceeding through the successive four stages: assimilation,memorization,expression and transmission.Based on memetics,this study proposes a writing teaching method,that is,imitation writing based on memetics.An experiment is carried out to explore the effectiveness of this method employed in writing teaching.This study aims to explore the following questions:1.What are the difficulties in English writing students in high school confront?2.Can imitation writing based on memetics decrease students’ anxiety about English writing?3.Can imitation writing based on memetics enhance students’ English writing proficiency?In this study,two classes of Senior One in Jinan University Town Experimental Senior High School are arranged as the research participants,with each class having 46 students.One class is chosen randomly as the experimental class and the other is the control class.A four-month teaching experiment is conducted.In the process of experimental intervention,the experimental class is engaged in the instruction of imitation writing based on memetics.The control class,however,adopts the traditional product approach.The research principally utilizes questionnaires and tests to collect data which are analyzed by SPSS 24.0.Moreover,interview is used to gather qualitative data which are turned into words and organized for analysis.The results suggest that students face three primary problems in writing: poor content,unnatural expression with grammatical mistakes and disordered organization.Furthermore,students face a high level of writing anxiety.It turns out that after the experiment the above writing difficulties can be resolved by imitation writing based on memetics to a certain degree.In addition,this method results in decreasing students? writing anxiety and boosting their writing proficiency.Thus,this research is anticipated to offer some practical suggestions for English writing teaching.The English teachers are recommended to create appropriate language context for writing teaching and pay particular attention to the integration of language skills.Additionally,the English teachers are suggested to help students to output creatively on the basis of imitation.