The Application Of Memetics To English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School

As Harmer (1990) said, vocabulary provides language with the important organsas well as flesh and blood, if the language structure is compared to its skeleton.English vocabulary is one of the important parts of English teaching. Nevertheless, itis found that vocabulary learning is one of the weakest links for Chinese senior highschool students. Besides, students’ interests as well as learning initiative are hardly tobe aroused by the traditional model of vocabulary teaching, which leads to unsatisfiedeffect.Memetics as a new theory, which is based on Darwin’s evolutionary viewpoints,explains the principles of cultural evolution. In1976, the concept of “meme” wasfirstly put forward by Richard Dawkins, zoologist of Oxford University in his TheSelfish Gene. The theory has drawn more and more attention from Chinese languagescholars, with the proposal of language memetics by professor He Ziran in2001. Upto now, language memetics has become one of the most important theories in the fieldof applied linguistics. The theory, which mainly inspects language and relatedphenomenon, not only reveals the rules of language developments, but also offers anew idea for English language teaching. With the guidance of memetics theory, thewriter applies the language memetics into English vocabulary teaching to trainstudents’ vocabulary learning strategies as well as their abilities, which improves theefficiency of vocabulary teaching and promotes the students to learn vocabulary moreeffectively.In recent years, more and more scholars have been doing researches about therelationship between memetics theory and English vocabulary teaching. However, theapplication of memetics into senior high school English vocabulary teaching is rare.Therefore adopting the method of quantitative and qualitative study, the writer applysthe memetics into senior high school vocabulary teaching. The writer makes a surveyof the domestic and overseas study on the memetics theory and English vocabularyteaching and then illustrates the related concepts of meme as well as memetics. Next,teaching experiment is carried out. Questionnaires are to expore the effects of seniorhigh school English vocabulary teaching. After the teaching experiment, the resultsshow that vocabulary teaching based on memetics can not only improve students’scores, but also promote students to master some effective learning strategies and greatly increase students’ initiative, confidence and interests in learning vocabulary insome degree.