Research On Application Of Memetics To English Vocabulary Teaching In Junior High School

With the rapid development of the globalization,English has been a necessary communication tool of all the countries.So learning English well is imperative.Vocabulary is the foundation of learning language.On the one hand,vocabulary is the foundation of learning language knowledge.On the other hand,it plays an important role in developing language skills: listening,speaking,reading and writing.For middle school students,it's the initial period to learn and accumulate vocabulary at a phase of junior high school.Therefore,vocabulary teaching is necessary for English teaching in junior high school.However,due to the limitation of lessons and burdensome tasks in the actual teaching,vocabulary teaching is usually ignored.At the same time,students' interests of vocabulary learning are low,learning effects are low and the vocabulary is limited.So it' s an important issue for English teachers to think about what kind of teaching method can improve students' vocabulary learning interests and effects.Memetics is a new theory which is used to explain the law of culture evolution.It mainly explores the replication,distribution and evolution of memes.In a broad sense,memetics can be used to study the thing which can be imitated to replicate and transmit.In fact,imitation and replication is one of the most important methods of learning language.From the perspective of language vocabulary teaching,everything related to vocabulary can be regarded as memes,such as affixes,roots,lexical chunks,even vocabulary teaching strategies.In the previous English teaching studies,memetics is mainly applied into writing in senior high schools or universities.But few of them discuss applying the memetics into vocabulary teaching in junior high school.As a result,according to the lifecycle of memetics,this paper concentrates on vocabulary teaching in junior high school.Three questions are mainly discussed: 1.Can the vocabulary teaching method based on memetics in junior high school improve students' vocabulary learning interests? 2.Can the vocabulary teaching method based on memetics in junior high school help students build positive vocabulary learning beliefs and habits? 3.Can the vocabulary teaching method based on memetics in junior high school improve students' vocabulary learning effects? What are these aspects in detail?To solve these questions,the author carried out an investigation through choosing one class as the experimental class and the other one as the control class in a middle school in Mianyang.This study mainly adopted two research methods: questionnaire and test.In order to analyze and compare the change of vocabulary learning interests,the author made questionnaires to these two classes before and after the experiment.Meanwhile,the author made tests to these two classes before and after the experiment to analyze their learning effects.At last,three conclusions were obtained through collecting and analyzing data:1.The vocabulary teaching method based on memetics in junior high school can improve students' vocabulary learning interests.2.The vocabulary teaching method based on memetics in junior high school can help students build positive vocabulary learning beliefs and habits.3.The vocabulary teaching method based on memetics in junior high school improve students' vocabulary learning effects,which are mainly in the comprehension of words,the improvement of skill of guessing words and the application of word formation.