A Study Of Language Transfer Of Han And Dai Students In English Writing In A Junior High School From The Perspective Of Memetics

Language transfer is always a central issue of applied linguistics, second languageacquisition (SLA) and language research. Memetics, a new theory, is graduallyreceiving an increasing amount of attention in the field of pragmatics. The presentstudy has continued that focus by analyzing language transfer of Han and Dai studentsin English writing in a junior high school from the perspective of memetics. The studyaims to analyze the characteristics of Han and Dai students’ language transfer inEnglish writing as well as explaining their language transfers from the angle ofmemetics. Multi-method approaches including the qualitative method and quantitativemethod underpinned the study, which is the analysis of the test paper. One hundredand four compositions were collected from a class randomly. Fifty-two studentsincorporating twenty-five Han students and twenty-seven Dai students in the classcompleted the test papers, which were designed according to the Englishcompositions. According to memetics, the similarities make the memes of the nativelanguage and English memes compatible, which improves the English learning. Onthe contrary, some previous memes take advantage in the competition with newmemes when they are unlike, whose result is that students replicate and transmit theprevious memes in the process of English learning. Thus, the negative transferappeared. In accordance with the translation result, both Han and Dai students made alarge number of errors in the collocation of word. Meanwhile, Han students and Daistudents were different in the aspect of word order. Dai students aided more memes ofthe native language, so that some characteristics in Dai language were beneficial toEnglish learning to a certain degree, while they also became the obstruction in someaspects. The results of the study contributed to an application of memetics in SLA anda novel thinking on the study of language transfer. These results suggested thatcorresponding teaching methods could be made to improve English teaching andlearning based on the characteristics of memes.