A Study On The Application Of Memetics-Based Lexical Chunks To English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

Writing is one of the fundamental English language skills,and it objectively reflects a student’s ability to apply language in a comprehensive manner.However,writing is also a difficult language skill to improve.Although both teachers and students have invested a lot of time and energy in English writing,the quality of students’ English writing needs to be improved.After students have mastered a large number of vocabularies,their expression ability is not improved accordingly.Memetics reveals the rule of language development,and the replication and transmission of language memes provide a new research concept for foreign language teaching,which motivate teacher to improve students’ English writing ability by using the characteristics of meme replication and transmission.Some linguists,such as Lewis(1993),advocates the application of lexical chunks in language teaching,and theoretically demonstrate that lexical chunks can promote English learners’ writing proficiency.Therefore,in order to investigate the effects of memetics-based lexical chunks in English writing teaching for senior high school students,this study takes memetics as the theoretical framework,integrates the relevant characteristics of lexical chunks and language memes,carries out the lexical chunks teaching as the core with the aid of life cycle of meme to make an study on English writing teaching in senior high school.This study applies memetics-based lexical chunks to English writing teaching in senior high school and tries answering the following three questions: 1.What are the effects of memetics-based lexical chunks on students’ lexical chunks awareness in English writing? 2.What are the effects of memetics-based lexical chunks on students’ English writing performance? 3.What are the effects of memetics-based lexical chunks on the English writing performance of high,middle,and low level students? The subjects are class 13 and class 14 of a senior high school in Wushan County of Gan Su province.Class 13 is randomly selected as the experimental class consisting of 50 students and Class 14 is the control class consisting of 49 students.The teaching begins in September 2022,and ends of November 2022.In the experiment,experimental class adopts memetics-based lexical chunks in English writing teaching,while control class adopts the product method for English writing teaching.This study conducts pre-test and post-test on the experimental class and the control class before and after the experiment,as well as two questionnaires and interview in the experimental class.Statistical analysis of the experimental data is performed using SPSS24.0 data statistics software.The experimental results demonstrate that memetics-based lexical chunks firstly have improved students’ awareness of lexical chunks in English writing after the experiment,which is manifested in the students’ emphasis on the classification and accumulation of lexical chunks in class;the diversity of ways to remember lexical chunks;the use of different types lexical chunks in English writing.Secondly,the writing performance of the experimental class is significantly improved,according to a comparison of the pre-test and post-test results of the experimental class and the control class.Thirdly,memetics-based lexical chunks has different effects on the English writing performance of different level students,the study has the greatest effect on high score group,followed by the group with the middle score,and finally the group with the low score through comparative analysis of the experimental class before and after the writing test scores.The research results indicate that memetics-based lexical chunks can improve the writing performance of senior high school students.However,there are still some limitations because of the short experimental period,small sample size and limited teaching materials and writing topics.So it is expected that further research can resolve the limitations.