The Application Of Memetics In College English Vocabulary Teaching

The recognition of vocabulary as the basis of any foreign language and the premise of other language skills has been well-established. Thus, the last two or three decades have witnessed a revival of interest in vocabulary study and research in the SLA field. In response to this change of vocabulary status in foreign language teaching and to the difficulty students face with, while many good old methods of vocabulary teaching have been retained, new classroom practices and methods are constantly created, which reflects both researchers'and teachers'attempts and efforts to find more efficient and effective ways of teaching vocabularies. Accordingly, numerous theories in various fields, such as in language, education, psychology, culture, have found their application in foreign language vocabulary teaching. Following this trend, the present thesis writer attempts to apply a new theory—memetics—to college English vocabulary teaching and tries further to testify its effectiveness by an empirical research.Memetics is the theoretical and empirical science that studies the replication, spread and evolution of memes. According to it, a meme is"a unit of cultural transmission"or"a unit of imitation."Everything a person has learned by imitation from someone else or everything that is passed from person to person (in the broad sense) by imitation is a meme. Inspired by this, the thesis here argues for viewing all the established words in a language (free morphemes), affixes, roots and other word formatives (bound morphemes), as well as lexical chunks together with major rules of word formation and popular vocabulary learning strategies as vocabulary memes. English vocabulary teaching, in essence, is an intensified activity for replicating and transmitting these different levels of vocabulary memes to a targeted large group of people.A memetic way of vocabulary teaching will consequently have a profound impact on the vocabulary teaching practice in China, especially on changing the present unsatisfactory traditional way of teaching discrete textbook-based vocabularies in many Chinese universities. In this thesis, an empirical research is designed and implemented to probe into its effectiveness. With 129 freshmen in Qingdao Technological University as participants, the data from the research indicate that a memetic way of vocabulary teaching can not only cause a positive change in students'vocabulary learning but also is relatively more effective than the aforementioned traditional way of vocabulary teaching. Therefore, the application of memetics in vocabulary teaching is both feasible and successful and could be considered as a beneficial meme that should be copied to a wider area to benefit more vocabulary learners.