An Experimental Research On The Effects Of English Vocabulary Instruction In Senior High School From The Perspective Of Meme Theory

Vocabulary is the core of a language,and vocabulary learning plays a vital role in language acquisition.As Wilkins(1972)says “Without grammar,little meaning can be expressed;without vocabulary,nothing can be conveyed.” However,many learners still have no idea about learning vocabulary effectively.In recent years,there have many researches on middle school vocabulary teaching from different perspectives,and a few are from the perspective of Meme Theory(MT).Many students are still suffering from the vocabulary learning difficulties,and teachers do not know how to guide students to learn vocabulary effectively.Confronting with the current vocabulary learning problems,this research tries to improve students' vocabulary learning proficiency based on Meme Theory.In order to change English teachers' current teaching situations and help students learn to use the Mme-based vocabulary learning method well,the author tries to make an experimental research on the Meme-based vocabulary teaching in middle school to testify the great effect of Meme-based vocabulary teaching and learning.In this research,the author tries to integrate the genotype meme and the phenotype meme to build different vocabulary sense relations.Thus the author proposes the hypothesis as follows:(1)Can vocabulary teaching from the perspective of Meme Theory improve students' breadth of vocabulary knowledge?(2)Can vocabulary teaching from the perspective of Meme Theory improve students' depth of vocabulary knowledge?(3)Can vocabulary teaching from the perspective of Meme Theory make students take a positive attitude to the vocabulary learning?In this experiment,the author chose two classes of Senior One students in GZ Second Foreign Language School.There were 76 students in the two classes(38students in each class).The two classes had the same learning conditions.The control class was taught in traditional vocabulary teaching method while the experimental class was taught under the guidance of Meme Theory.Before the experiment,the two classes took the proficiency test and the Vocabulary Level Test.After the experiment,all the participants took the final test,theVocabulary Level Test and the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale.Students in the the EC were divided into three levels according to their English learning conditions.12 interviewees were randomly selected from the three levels to take the interview.They were asked to answer six topic related questions.The software SPSS 19.0 was used to deal with those test data.The Independence Sample T-test was used in the results of pre-tests and the post-tests of the two classes.The Pair Sample T-test was used to compare the difference between the proficiency test and the final test of the two classes separately.As expected,the final results respond to the former hypothesis:(1)Students' final scores are much higher than before,and their vocabulary learning levels are truly improved.(2)Vocabulary teaching from the perspective of Meme Theory can improve students' breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge.Students can learn to build their own vocabulary library and find the vocabulary sense relations under the instruction of Meme Theory.(3)It can also help students take the positive attitude toward learning vocabulary.In addition,The hyponym,antonyms,synonyms,derivations,compound words,fixed words,and so on can be taught and learned easily.The Meme-based vocabulary lesson is more interesting and more effective than the traditional vocabulary teaching lesson.The teaching implications are concluded as follows: the teacher should help students build up their meme-relevant lexical library.This lexical library can help students expand the related vocabulary scale.The teacher should make the Meme-based vocabulary teaching plan feasible and workable.In addition,the teacher is supposed to guide students to apply the relevant lexical-meme to their vocabulary learning.The teaching findings and suggestions will be discussed in details in the last chapter.Furthermore,the author gains many valuable pedagogical implications.However,there also remain some limitations in the research needed to be supplemented and some problems needed to be solved.