Teaching English Writing In Chinese Vocational Colleges: A Perspective Of Language Meme

Memetics is a new theory for explaining the cultural evolution based on Darwin's evolution theory.“Meme,” the core concept in memetics,refers to a unit of cultural transmission,such as the replicated and transmitted language,ideas and behaviors.It is believed that language itself is meme;any word,sentence,and even discourse can become memes after several stages of replication and transmission.This study associates memetics to second language acquisition for the purpose of exploring for an effective method of teaching English writing to vocational college students in China.Based on an integration of the memetics theory and the input and output theory,a five-step English writing teaching method is proposed,with the five steps being: selecting materials,reciting,imitative writing,creative writing,and peer assessment.But the efficacy of this method is yet to be attested in an empirical study.In 2015 two parallel classes from the Accounting Department of Wuhan Technical College of Communications participated in a 16-week research in an English writing course.These two classes were randomly designated as the experimental class(EC)and the control class(CC),with the former working on the five-step writing model based on the memetics theory while the latter receiving the traditional teaching method.After the 16-week study,a comparison was made on the two classes' performance in writing assessment.Meanwhile,pre-experiment and post-experiment questionnaires were distributed to the students of EC to understand their motivation change.An analysis of the experiment data yielded the following results:(1)According to the comparative analysis of writing assessment,the average score of pre-test in EC and CC is 8.069 and 8.049 respectively,and in post-test it is 9.326 and 8.274,paired T-test shows that there is remarkable statistic gap between pre-test and post-test in EC(P<0.05),while in CC,the difference is not significant.Thus,the memetic five-step writing model can help students improve their English writing competence;(2)as to the pre-experiment and post-experiment questionnaires collected in EC,the average score on achievement motivation and deep motivation increase from 3.44 to 4.05,and 3.98 to 4.63,respectively,and these differences are significant(P<0.05).Therefore,such model can also enhance students' motivation in English writing.