An Experimental Study Of Teaching Chinese Polysemy For Grade-6 Pupils Based On Memetics

Vocabulary is a major point in language learning and the proficiency of vocabulary directly affects the students' ability of reading comprehension and writing.In the whole process of learning Chinese vocabulary,polysemy plays an important role.The development and connection among the items of a polysemy illustrate the process of history and culture.The newly published Primary School Chinese Curriculum Standard emphasizes the understanding,using and writing of Chinese characters.Students are required to develop their language skills as well as knowing the rich history and culture behind them.Therefore,it is very important and necessary for teachers to help students to learn polysemy.The concept of meme first appeared in the book The Selfish Gene written by Dawkins in1976.The core of memetics is “meme” and the main point is “imitate”.Anything imitated and replicated from others can be called a “meme” and a language meme when entering a language.The relationship between language and meme was summarized and proposed by Gui Shichun in 2002.And then He Ziran made further studies about language meme and achieved great results.Based on these results and the theory of memetics,the author carried out an experimental study of teaching Chinese polysemy for Grade-6 pupils in primary school.This research mainly contains two questions:1.Is memetic way of teaching Chinese polysemy for Grade-6 pupils more effective than the conventional method?2.Will the memetic way of teaching Chinese polysemy benefit the Grade-6 pupils in improving their learning strategies?The teaching experimental study lasted for 102 days.The subjects are 70 students from Class Three and Class Four of a primary school in a countryside.The experimental class adopted the teaching method of “Looking up dictionary— Explaining by meme—Exercises”,while the controlled class adopted the conventional teaching method:“Explaining—Exercises”.Through analyzing the data after the study,the research results are as follows: firstly,the teaching method of “Looking up dictionary—Explaining by meme—Exercises” helps students form a new learning habit or method,but it makes a little improvement.The students use the conventional ways to memorize frequently.Secondly,compared with conventional teaching method,the new way of teaching Chinese polysemy has better teaching effectiveness.So the conclusion can be made that the teaching method of “Looking up dictionary—Explaining by meme—Exercises” is an effective mode which can improve students' comprehension ability of Chinese polysemy,enrich students' vocabulary knowledge and improve students' Chinese polysemy learning strategies.