A Study Of Imitation Writing Of Senior English-From The Perspective Of Memetics

Memetics, based on Darwin's evolutionary theory, is now a new pragmatic theory to reveal the law of cultural transmission. Imitation is the basis of memetics. Just like the other replicated genes, meme is copied, transmitted and finally survives through imitation among different vectors. A strong or successful meme passes a life circle of four stages, that is, assimilation, retention, expression and transmission. The processes of the meme and imitation writing have a close relationship. The four stages of imitation writing———input, memorization, output and interaction, are combined together in accordance with the complete memetic development. As you can see, we can guide students in the course of imitation writing input in two ways of replication and transmission———memetic genotype and memetic phenotype. Therefore, the present study introduces memetics into imitation writing, aiming to explore a more effective teaching method of imitation writing of senior English, under the control of the experienced reading and writing and the input amount.This research attempts to argue the hypotheses:1) The approach of imitation writing can change the students'attitudes and raise their interest towards English writing learning,2) Improve the students'language abilities and their thinking ways according to the mother tongue and develop their creative ability while writing in English.This paper first analyses the approaches applied in the Senior English writing teaching, introduces memetics and imitation writing by reviewing related literatures and then discusses their characteristics. To verify the hypotheses, we carried out an experiment which lasted 24 weeks.90 students from two classes of 2009 in the No.1 High School of Chen Xi participated in the experiment. A pre-experiment English writing test was held to prove that the students of both the experiment class (45) and the control class (45) were of the same writing proficiency. There were 24 weeks of imitation writing training for the experiment class, and a post-experiment English writing test was held to testify the effectiveness of the imitation writing and also prove that the approach of the experience reading and writing and the amount of the input of English will have an affirmative effect on the imitation writing. Pre-experiment and post-experiment questionnaires were distributed to the students of the experimental group to find out their attitudes to imitation writing.Through the analysis of the collected data, we may find that the approach from the perspective of memetics combined with imitation writing and memetics can stimulate high school students'interest and evoke their enthusiasm for English writing much better than the way that students write by direct and simple imitation. Also, it is found that senior students'writing competence in content and language accuracy may be improved while their comprehensive language proficiency can be enhanced through the imitation writing approach from the perspective of memetics, so as to develop their creative abilities of English in the pragmatic field. And this study is believed to be a beneficial attempt for the high school students to improve their language abilities, especially their writing abilities, and high school teachers of English to gain a new and effective writing approach to help their students.