A Study Of Imitation Writing To Improve Vocational College Students’ Letter Writing From The Perspective Of Memetics

Memetics, based on Darwin’s evolutionary theory, is a new pragmatic theory on elaboratingthe law of cultural transmission. Meme is a unit of cultural transmission. Language itself is akind of meme. It is believed that there is a close relationship between meme and languageteaching, and meme had a positive effect on imitation teaching. This study introduces memeticstheory into English letter writing. It mainly employs imitation writing from the perspective ofmemetics as the specific strategy for subjects to practice. This study seeks to explore an effectiveway to integrate language memes and language writing, and thereby to improve students’ Englishletter writing in vocational college.The research questions to be addressed in the study are as follows:1) If imitation writing from the perspective of memetics is effective in helping vocationalcollege students improve their letter writing, at what aspects does it work?2) What are the subjects’ attitudes towards the approach?This study lasted10weeks, and the participants were two classes from a vocational college.They were divided into control group(35students) and experiment group(35students). Imitationwriting from the perspective of Memetic approach was taught in the experiment group and thecontrol group was instructed in the traditional method, product approach. During the process ofthe experiment, four different types of letter writings were respectively provided to the twogroups, which refer to Letters of complaint, Thank-you letters, Letters of invitation, and Lettersof application. Both of the groups were confronted with pre-test and post-test. Questionnaireswere given out in experiment group as soon as the post-test finished. All the collected data wereanalyzed with the statistical software SPSS.Based on the analysis of data, it shows that imitation writing from the perspective ofmemetic theory is more suitable for vocational college students than that of traditional writingteaching method. According to the complete memetic development process, four teaching stages,input, internalization, output and interaction, evoke students’ enthusiasm for English letterwriting. At the beginning, little differences exist in the writing levels of the two groups, however,changes have taken place in the experiment group after10-week training. There are three aspectswhich could account for the subjects’ improvements. At vocabulary level, the subjects from theEG employ more diversified vocabulary in their writing. In terms of sentences, the subjects fromthe EG show a higher frequency on using clauses which makes their compositions more fluent,concise and pure. In addition, their passage patterns are more formal and logical. What’s more, the results of the questionnaire indicate that90%of students in experimental group hold apositive attitude towards imitation writing and assure that they will continue to apply it in theirfuture writing activity.There still exist some deficiencies in the present study. Nevertheless, this research hasbasically reached the expected goals and has provided some valuable pedagogical suggestionsfor further language writing teaching. Also, it may inspire more researchers to make great effortson this aspect in the future.