Imitation Writing Approach In Teaching Non-English Postgraduates’ English Academic Writing

English writing has been concerned by more and more scholars since it became an independent subject.There are many studies on English writing teaching at home and abroad. Based on previous studies of thosescholars, this thesis tries to find out whether imitation writing approach is effectively in teachingnon-English postgraduates’English academic writing under the memetics theory. Memetics is a new theoryto explain the principle of culture evolution based on the Darwinian, proposed firstly in Dawkins’TheSelfish Gene in 1976. Meme has two meaning, the information stored in human’s brain is meme, and theinformation broadcasted by various kinds of methods is also meme. Meme survives relying on beingcopied and broadcasted; language is one of its carriers. In China, Professor He Ziran illustrated therelationship between meme and language teaching in 2005, he mentioned that meme had a positive effecton imitation teaching. From this point, the author tries to study whether the imitating writing approach isefficient on the teaching of postgraduates’English academic writing.The author chooses the postgraduates’English academic writing course as the carrier of this study.To every postgraduate, it’s a compulsory subject about English writing. Most universities requirepostgraduates to publish one or two papers before they graduate, some need to publish on SCI or Englishpaper about international meetings. The author chose two classes of Grade One postgraduates in NorthUniversity of China as the subjects by random sampling. One class is chosen as the control group (CG), theother class is chosen for the experimental group (EG). They were taught by the same teacher to minimizethe effects to the results of experiment which caused by other factors.This thesis uses the qualitative and quantitative research methods to support this study. The qualitativeresearch is the classroom observation. During the experiment, the author makes one class observation of thetwo groups each week according to the observation form designed before the experiment to see thesubjects’reaction to the imitation writing approach and their usual teaching approach. The quantitativeresearch involves in two methods: test and questionnaire. There is a pretest on the subjects’writing beforethe experiment, and a posttest after the experiment. The pretest was conducted for making sure how big of the difference between the CG and the EG. The posttest proves whether the imitation writing approach isefficient. The results of these two tests will be analyzed through the SPSS 16.0 in Chapter Four. Thequestionnaire was collected from the EG after the experiment to investigate the subjects’attitude to theimitation writing approach.The aim and significance of this study is drawing people’s attention to imitation writing approachwhich is seen as a traditional teaching approach and is neglected in recent years through this study. Thisstudy can also make people to pay more attention to memetics, and it’s reasonable to carry out imitationwriting approach under the memetics.