A Study Of English Writing Teaching In High School Based On Memetics

Listening, speaking, reading and writing are elementary abilities which studentsare supposed to master in English acquisition, among which writing is the reflectionof students’ overall level. It is a type of creative talent. Authors need to freely recordwhat they feel inclined to convey. Hence, students are not only required to masterabundant vocabulary and accurate grammar, but also supposed to grasp and utilizeeach written expression flexibly. Therefore, writing has always been considered as themost difficult skill to master. The reason why students are in weak positions of thisability lies in various factors. The lack of language reserve and accumulation is oneaspect, another is that students are not capable of clear expression and languageidiomaticity effectuated with inter-language negative transfer. There are even morestudents who feel hard to express themselves literally because of knowledge povertyin mind. Old sayings explained the significance of language accumulation andimitation, such as “God seems to help you when you get enough knowledgeaccumulation.”“If you have recited many Tang Poems, you can chant poetry even ifyou cannot create.” Ultimately, writing is a course of imitation and language output.The importance of writing exists in many aspects ranging from teaching tovarious examinations and job-hunting in real life. Writing is always the most worringpart in English study because of its extraordinarily time consumption and particularlyhigh rate of loss. For this reason, high level’s writing ability will be the trump card forstudents to obtain high scores in all sorts of examinations. While for job-hunting, abang-up cover letter or resume will also be the highlight, making you provocative ofthe crowd. When at work, a decent business letter or corresponding may also wincooperation opportunities for the company. Hence, how to improve students’ writinglevel becomes a hot issue which many researchers take interest in. This thesis tries toapply memetics into high school English teaching. Currently, the mainly respectedEnglish writing teaching schools are “Product Approach”“Process Approach”,“Genre-based Approach" etc. These methods had ever been brought in the writingteaching and won many experts and scholars’ argumentation. However, years of teaching practice did not have significant effects, failing to realize the desired results.As the mainstream method of domestic writing teaching, product approach puts itsfocus on writing achievement, overly concerned by language accuracy and articlequality, ignoring students’ language input. Writing teaching classroom which adoptedprocess approach is difficult to control. When brainstorming, students feel hard toreach a consensus opinion. In addition, this method focuses too much on the sentencefluency, giving little care to the basic grammar, which is inactive for beginners.Genre-based approach also has its malpractice. Due to multidinous genres and limitedwriting courses, it seems unlikely to learn all genres of writing within a very shorttime. This thesis attempts to introduce the memetics into high school English teaching.The core of this concept is that language can be passed along through successivegenerations resembling genes by the way of imitation, absorption, convey,transmission, etc.Memetics is a provocative new theory laying foundation on Darwin’s evolutiontheory, trying to interpreting the evolutionary rule of culture diachronically andsynchronically, which mainly carries out discussion and research surrounding memes.Memetics theory regards meme as a kind of phenomenon which is similar to gene.Just as genes multiply by heredity, as the elementary unit of culture, memes gettransmission through imitation. Anything, as long as it can be imitated, spreaded andabsorbed by others, falls into memes. Language is no exception, which pertains tomemes from the memetic perspective. It can be shown on the lexical, syntactic anddiscourse levels. If words in English are considered as natural units, then each word isa potential meme. Subsequently, some memes will form a cluster. Memes make offtwo types: strong memes as well as weak memes. In a nutshell, certain words, phrases,sentences which get widely emulated and cited after being spreaded are strong memes.In contrast, if the language is no longer spread and gradually abandoned or evenforgotten, we call it weak meme. Whether memes are strong or weak depends on itstransmission ability and survival index. The life cycle of memes include: assimilation,retention, expression, transmission. These four stages just reflects the whole processof English writing, namely the assimilation and retention stages input a large amount of information, while the expression and transmission stages output the informationwhich was just input, forming a new writing teaching mode: elaborately select classicwords, sentences, paragraphs and chapters or other aspects of language memes fromthe teaching materials, which are in the brain and stored in the host’s brain, that isteacher’s brain, then assimilate learners by a certain way, learners imitate and finallyachieve innovative applications. This subject is to explore how to use memetic theoryto guide high school students in English writing, thus promoting the students’ writingcompetence. The followings are two research questions presented by the author:1)Can Meme-based writing practice promote high school students’ English writingproficiency?2) Does the Meme-based approach reduce students’ worries in theEnglish writing process?This research is carried out in No.2High School of Anyang City located in HenanProvince, from which100students are selected as experimental subjects. Studentswere taught in two groups under the instruction of the same teachers with identicallearning performance and attitudes. One of the groups is the experimental group,which accepted writing training under the guidance of meme-based approach, the corecontent of which is to let students learn English writing materials revolving aroundmemory method by imitating and reading, reciting and repeating, etc. Another groupis controlled group, which used traditional English writing teaching method, onlyaccepting the teacher’s comment on writing assignments. The research was designedwithree stages: In the first place, the questionnaire survey will be carried out amongstudents in order to know the students’ problems in the process of writing. At themeantime, the pre-test writing will be conducted. For the sake of the experiment’saccuracy and validity, pre-test writing is used to verify whether the students’ writinglevels are identical. In the second stage, the experimental and the controlled group aresupposed to accept16weeks’ writing teaching; in the third stage, post-test writingwill be organized. Meanwhile, the writing scores of the experimental group and thecontrolled group would be analyzed. By analyzing the significant differences value,verify whether the student’s writing skills improve upon comparing with that before experiment. Meanwhile, another questionnaire is put into force again to see whetherthe students recognize this experimental method.Contrasting the data collected from the pre-writing and post-writing tests, we canfind that the meme-based approach receives positive feedback and that the Englishwriting proficiency of the EG has been improved upon a lot, which indicates thepracticability and availability of the teaching experiment. Seen from thequestionnaires collected, the data indicates that the students’ attitudes towards Englishwriting have been changed obviously compared with those before the experiment.What’s more, they are not fearful for English writing with the increasing confidencearoused by the meme-based approach. Memetics provides a fresh teaching perspective,viewing that there is necessity to bring in traditional teaching methods such asrecitation and imitation, making the language teaching better. The imitation isnecessary means and processes for innovation, which is served for the purpose andresult of imitation.