An Empirical Study Of The Imitation And Recitation Teaching Method In CET-4Writing Teaching Based On Memetics

College English Test Band4(CET-4) has been executed for more than20years. Amongall the parts in the CET-4, reading comprehension, translation and others have been adjusteddrastically except writing which still accounts for15percent after two reforms. Throughanalyzing the previous candidates’ exam results, it’s easy to find that the students have beenregarding the writing procedure which is ignored in college English teaching as a difficult partin the exam. The English writing level can directly reflect the students’ integrated proficiencyin English and the students’ writing ability can also reflect the quality of college Englishteaching. How to change the current situation of English teaching and how to improve thenon-English major students’ writing level are the emphasis and difficulty of the present study.Based on the researches of the domestic and overseas English writing literatures andrelated theories, the thesis explores the effectivity of the imitation and recitation teachingmethod from the perspective of Memetics on English writing of non-English major students inhigher vocational schools. The research is built around three questions.1) Does the imitationand recitation method based on Memetics apply to the college English writing teaching?2)Can the imitation and recitation method based on Memetics improve the students’ writingability effectively?3) Can the imitation and recitation method based on Memetics change thestudents’ attitudes so that they can increase their interests during the process of writing? Theteaching experiment and questionnaire surveys are carried out to prove these hypotheses.Two classes of60students who study further for Bachelor degree in Grade2013fromChaoyang teachers college are chosen as the research subject in the teaching experiment. Theexperiment is carried out without any influence on the regular teaching. Before conducting it,the students from both the experimental group (altogether30students) and the control group(altogether30students) are given a pretest to prove they have the same English level. Then,the students from the experimental group (EG) are trained intensively for16weeks (fromSeptember2013to January2014) to improve their writing ability by means of imitating andreciting words, sentences, idiomatic expressions and model essays etc. Meanwhile, thestudents from the control group (CG) just receive the regular classroom teaching without thesimilar intensive writing training. After the experiment, a posttest is conducted to all thestudents from two groups. To get the scientific and accurate results, the collected data areanalyzed systematically with the software package of Statistical Package for Social Science(SPSS17.0). Through comparing the results of the pretest and the posttest, it can be concludedthat the imitation and recitation method based on Memetics applies to English writing teaching and effectively improves the students’ English proficiency. Through analyzing thepretest and posttest questionnaires collected from the students in EG, the conclusion can bereached that the imitation and recitation teaching method can stimulate the students’ Englishwriting enthusiasm, change the students’ writing attitudes and improve the students’comprehensive language ability.