A Study On The Application Of Memetics Theory To English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School

Vocabulary is of great importance for using language. As Harmer(1990) said, vocabulary provides language with the important organs as well as flesh and blood, if the language structure is compared to its skeleton. English vocabulary is one of the important parts of English teaching. Memetics as a new theory,which is based on Darwin’s evolutionary viewpoints, explains the principles of Cultural Revolution.Richard Dawkins, a famous behavioral ecologist and zoologist at the Oxford University, firstly came up with the conception of meme. It comes from The Selfish Gene in 1976. The theory, which mainly inspects language and related phenomenon, not only reveals the rules of language developments, but also offers a new idea for English language teaching.Basing on the above, the researcher adopted the method of quantitative and qualitative study to apply memetics theory into senior high school vocabulary teaching during two months’ internship in Lanzhou No.9 High School. Before dong the research, the researcher makes a survey of the domestic and overseas study on the memetics and English vocabulary teaching and then illustrates the related concepts of meme as well as memetics. Then, teaching experiment is carried out.During the 2 months’ study, the researcher chose two classes of senior one as participants: class one is the experimental group and class three is the control group. Tests and questionnaires were chosen as instruments. After the research period, data were collected and analyzed with the aid of SPSS, the results implicated that: the memetics to vocabulary teaching can cause a positive change in students’ vocabulary learning beliefs and strategies can improve students’ vocabulary achievements and also can cause a positive change in students’ vocabulary retention.Finally, this study concludes that vocabulary teaching based on memetics can not only improve students’ scores, but also promote students to master some effective learning strategies and greatly increase students’ initiative, confidence and interests in learning vocabulary in some degree. Due to the limitation of time and research experience, it still needs further research.