An Experimental Study Of Memetics-based English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

Writing is very important for language learning. It can consolidate language knowledge, and it is an important means of language output and personal communication, which can be fully reflected in New English Curriculum Standards of General Senior High School. Writing training is regarded as an effective way to improve senior high school students’ English comprehensive competence. Therefore English writing teaching becomes one of the most important aspects of English teaching. But there are many problems in the current English writing teaching, what’s more, there is a big gap between the students’ writing competence and the demands of New English Curriculum Standards of General Senior High School. Improving the English writing teaching of senior high school becomes more and more prominent, so far many scholars and teachers has made many efforts for it.Combining memetics and English writing teaching of senior high school, this study designs a new model for English writing teaching and carries out a teaching experiment. The experiment subjects are 120 students who come from Gang Yuan senior high school of Handan. Through the teaching experiment, the author attempts to answer four research questions.1) Can English writing teaching under the guidance of memetics enhance students’ lexical density?2) Can English writing teaching under the guidance of memetics increase students’ syntactic complexity?3) Can English writing teaching under the guidance of memetics improve students’ writing achievements?4) Can English writing teaching under the guidance of memetics relieve the students’ writing anxiety?These questions are based on the problems existed in the English writing teaching. In order to solve them, this study uses two research methods: questionnaire survey and teaching experiment. The author adopts Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory(SLWAI) created by Cheng(2004). In the teaching experiment, the experiment class adopts the writing teaching method under the guidance of memetics, while the control class still adopts its former teaching method. According to questionnaire survey and teaching experiment, the author tries to find that how does memetics applied in English writing teaching, as well as to provide some suggestions for English writing teaching of senior high school.The results answer the research questions and conclude that English writing teaching under the guidance of memetics is effective in following aspects. First, it can enrich the students’ writing vocabularies, and can increase students’ lexical density, so as to add the amount of information of students’ compositions. Second, it can improve the students’ syntactic complexity, which encourages students to use more complex clauses in their writing. Third, students can improve the overall achievements of writing by increasing lexical density and syntactic complexity. Fourth, it can relieve students’ writing anxiety, and stimulate students’ enthusiasm of writing, as well as cultivate students’ confidence for English writing.This study provides some suggestions for the current English writing teaching. Teachers should guide students to input much language materials in reading, therefore students can create their own language library, through the imitation, students choose language materials from their abundant language library to work out advanced compositions.