A Study Of The Effects On Writing Of Memetics On College English Teaching

Writing is a way of expressing ideas in verbal form of language, so composition is thecomprehensive embodiment of language competence and application for students. Moreover,writing plays a critical role in College English Tests and Graduate Admission Examination. Soimproving writing ability can not be ignored in college English teaching.Memetics is the emerging theory in pragmatic fields, which reveals the rules oflanguage development, evolution and transmission. It provides new sights for foreignlanguage teaching. In the past few years, writing templates become the order of the day. Moreand more students choose to improve their writing scores in the shortcut of memorizingtemplates mechanically, resulting in the stereotyped writing style and low writing skill. So thefour stages (assimilation, memorization, expression, transmission) of meme lifecycle show usthat only the reception of knowledge could not transform the knowledge into the strong memewhich could be used at any time. So it is necessary to apply the four stages of meme lifecycleinto teaching.This study is based on Memetics theory, proposed by the zoologist of OxfordUniversity Richard Darkins. Sophomores of two classes in Chinese Department are chosen asthe research subjects. One is the experiment class. The four stages of meme lifecycle and thetwo patterns of meme transmission are applied in English teaching in this class. The otherclass is seen as control class, which is taught in traditional teaching method, putting theemphasis on the knowledge imparting. After sixteen weeks’ study, the author makes acomparison of their compositions in two classes. Firstly, software SPSS is used to make a dataanalysis in order to check the effect on English writing of Memetics on teaching. Secondly,the author will select several compositions on post-test randomly to make a detailedcomparison between the two classes. The following questions are put forwards:1) what are the effects of the memetics application on words usage?2）What are the effects of thememetics application on sentence structure?3) What are the effects of the memeticsapplication on paragraph structure?From the perspective of memetics, the related results of quantitative study andqualitative study show that the complete application of memetics theory on college Englishteaching do exert the positive effect on English writing. Firstly, vocabulary enlargement couldimprove the fossilization of vocabulary usage. Secondly, the diversity of sentence structuremay enrich the whole composition, so as to make compositions less dull. Thirdly, the masteryof the expansion way of paragraph structure may make an improvement in the disorder ofwriting structure. Finally, it can improve the comprehensive writing proficiencyfundamentally.