A Practical Study Of Memetics In The Teaching Of EFL Writing

College English teaching has been implemented for more than thirty years in China. Over these years, there have been many changes in English teaching. For example, the teaching objective has changed from teaching language itself to promoting learners'language skills. But there is a strange phenomenon in the field of English learning and teaching that students can not learn effectively. From the test results, it is obvious that writing is a more difficult skill than listening, reading and speaking, which is also the weakest skill in English teaching. How to promote English writing has been a hard and hot topic for the researchers. This research is intended to investigate the major difficulties in private college students'English composition. Moreover, many existing literature and related theories about English writing have been studied thoroughly. This thesis is an experimental research of the combination between memetics and theories concerning second language acquisition and how to apply this model into EFL writing teaching.Memetics is a new theory for interpreting cultural evolution. A meme is a unit of cultural transmission, like gene, is also subject to the selection "the survival of the fittest", which is copied through the imitation among vectors, only the strong memes can be survived. This infectivity of memes provides a close connection between memes and the process of second language learner's acquisition.The present study belongs to a qualitative research methodology. Three questions are tested through a teaching experiment and a questionnaire. They are: "Do there exist second language memes? Can EFL writing class provide a development environment for the memes to go through its complete life circle? Does this model guided by memetics in EFL writing work better than other models in the students'writing skill?" The answers to above questions are explained in the study. First, the author gives a review of memetics and input and output in SLA. Second, SLA is introduced into the memetics, that is to say, a relationship between SLA and memetics has been set up. Finally, the experiment on improving students'writing skill is carried out under the guidance of memetics. In order to investigate the effect, the teaching experiment is conducted in two parallel classes. Three tests are caried out which are pre-test, middle test and post-test. All the collected data are analyzed with the statistical software SPSS 11.5. The analysis of the One-way ANOVA test results show that the model of EFL writing teaching via memetics have positive influence on English writing.This thesis can be some help to English teaching; the positive results of the experiment provide important suggestions for the promotion of further exploration in this research field.