An Empirical Study Of English Productive Vocabulary Teaching Based On Memetics Among Junior Middle School Students

It is widely accepted that vocabulary learning has been regraded as a vital aspect of language learning process,which goes through the whole English teaching.Vocabulary-is the foundation of language and the basic material of language learning.Wilkins(1972)once indicated “Without grammar,little can be conveyed;without vocabulary,nothing can be conveyed.” Accordingly,vocabulary teaching is of great significance during language learning process.Nation(1990)posted that vocabulary can be divided into receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary.Whereas in the junior middle school,one of the biggest problems in English vocabulary learning is the level of learners’ productive vocabulary knowledge is relatively worse than the level of learner’s receptive vocabulary knowledge.Memetics is a new theory to study meme replication,transmission and imitation.It is first proposed by Dawkins and has been applied in many subjects widely.Memetics could be used for the object that can be imitated or replicated in human society broadly.In the perspective of English vocabulary learning process,word roofs,affixes,morphemes,lexical chunks and other vocabulary learning strategies can be treated as different types of memes,helping students to understand and learn the vocabulary in a better way.Although memetics has been widely applied in English teaching,there are very few empirical researches done in this area,especially for productive vocabulary.At the same time,it needs more further studies to verify whether teaching method based on memetics would bring a positive influence on vocabulary acquisition,as in the way on writing or reading teaching.Therefore,the present study attempts to employ memetics in English vocabulary teaching among junior middle students and explore its teaching effects.Students of two classes from a middle school in Nanchang are chosen as the subjects,and they are divided into the experimental class and the control class,and this experiment lasts for 16 weeks.The present study focuses on two issues:(1)Whether teaching method based on memetics will produce a better proficiency on productive vocabulary among junior middle students? If yes,to what degree?(2)What are the differences between students’ vocabulary learning strategies with meme,interest,attitude and confidence before and after using teaching method with memetics? In order to make clear understanding of these issues,teaching experiment,vocabulary test and questionnaire are used to investigate students’ vocabulary proficiency in the study.Data collected in the study is sorted out and analyzed by SPSS 17.0.Based on the results of the data,the major findings are as following:(1)The vocabulary teaching method based on memetics is helpful for students to improve the English productive vocabulary proficiency.The results of the pre-test show the English productive vocabulary level of the two classes are similar without significant difference.However,after the experiment,the average score of the post-test of the experimental class is significantly higher than the control class,demonstrating a significant difference in English productive vocabulary level between the two classes.The results of the two tests show that the vocabulary teaching method with memetics has great influence on students’ productive vocabulary learning and can improve students’ productive vocabulary proficiency.(2)The results of pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaires show that the students’ strategies with meme,interest,attitude and confidence toward English vocabulary learning have great changes after the experiment.After the experiment,students think they can apply vocabulary learning strategies based on memetics in vocabulary learning process better,such as homophone,affixes and roots according to the new words.Besides,students’ interest in vocabulary learning has become stronger,and their learning attitude gradually changed from indifferent to more positive,and from less confident to more confident.At the end of the study,the author puts forward some implications about how to help students to improve their productive vocabulary knowledge,in order that students can learn to apply the vocabulary meme types in English vocabulary learning process.In addition,some suggestions for future studies are also mentioned.