| The vocational English writing is designed to cultivate and enhance thevocational students’ comprehensive English application capabilities, especially thecapability to use English to deal with the daily and foreign business activities. Thecapability of English writing is not only one of the culminating manifestations ofcomprehensive language competence, but also one of the ultimate goals of Englishteaching. English writing is a core skill for vocational students to master and this skillis difficult for them. However, because of the high frequency of English writing use indaily life and working time, this skill should be taken seriously by the students andteachers. Therefore, how to improve students’ English writing ability, how to find amethod which is consistent with the basic requirements of vocational English teaching,fits a pattern of work-integrated learning education, and is suitable for students’ actualsituation of the effective methods of English writing teaching has attracted wideattention of experts and scholars.Memetic theory is a new theory for interpreting cultural evolution based onDarwin’s evolution theory. A meme, which is like a gene, is a unit of culturaltransmission, also obeys the rule of selection “the survival of the fittest”. In thisprocess, memes are copied through the imitation among vectors and only the strongmemes can be remembered by people. This infectivity of memes produces a veryclose connection between memes and the process of second language learners’acquisition. There are four steps in memes transmission: assimilation, retention,expression and transmission. These four procedures have close relationship with theprocedures of ESL writing that is input, memorization, output and interaction. If thesetwo processes are combined together, there will be a new ESL writing method formed.Through hypothesis and experiment, the author has testified whether this new methodexerted positive effect on students’ writing competence.In this research,80subjects from Non-English major in Shandong College ofTourism&Hospitality (the EC and CC both with40students) were invited toparticipate in this experiment. The instruments include questionnaire and test. TheMemetic-based teaching method was applied in EC while the traditional Englishwriting teaching method with no change was still used in CC. The experiment lastedfour months and all the data were analyzed by the software SPSS16.0after experiment.The study was explored:(1) Can recitation and imitation of language memes help students improve theirwriting, making them flexible in wording, phrasing and constructing sentences?(2) Can the skill of coherence, cohesion and passage construction be enhancedby imitation of language memes?(3) Can the students’ interest of writing be increased by the training of recitationand imitation?Through the analysis of the collected data, it was found that vocational collegestudents’ writing competence in content and language accuracy was improved whiletheir comprehensive language proficiency could be enhanced through the imitationwriting approach from the perspective of Memetics, in order to develop their creativeabilities of English in the pragmatic field. Also, it was found that the approach fromthe perspective of Memetics combined with imitation writing and Memetics couldstimulate vocational college students’ interest and evoke their enthusiasm for Englishwriting much better than traditional teaching method. And this study was a beneficialattempt for the vocational college students to improve their language abilities,especially their writing abilities, and vocational English college teachers to gain a newand effective writing approach to help their students. Meanwhile, limitations anddirection of further studies were showed. |
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