Applied Study Of Teaching Of English Reading In Vocational Senior High School Based On Memetics

The basic unit of cultural transmission, meme, was first proposed by Richard Dawkins who used meme to study the law of cultural development. Afterwards, scholars at home and abroad made more detailed analysis and classification, thus the research had laid a solid foundation for biology, psychology, sociology and linguistics, and enriched the field of meme. In 2003, He Ziran mentioned the importance of memetics in foreign language teaching. He thought the teaching method--recitation shouldn’t be discarded, but be applied to the teaching of foreign language through reproduction and transmission of memetics so that it could serve the teaching of foreign language. In addition, imitation and recitation are also important ways of inputting information. According to Krashen’s theory-Language Acquisition, the comprehensible input played an important role in the process of language acquisition. In fact, recitation can be also used as a way of comprehensible input to provide better input for imitating resources.There are two classes: the experimental class and the control class in this research.The researcher made a questionnaire to investigate the experimental students’ attitudes toward learning of English reading comprehension. According to the questionnaire, the students thought that English was very important for them, the learning method of recitation and imitation was very necessary. Therefore, this paper took the recitation and imitation under the perspective of memetics to analyze the students’ scores of English reading in vocational senior high school. Through the comparison between the scores of English reading in the experimental class and that in the control class, the researcher found the students’ reading level had no significant difference in the experiment class and the control class by Paired Samples T Test for the first test. And then the teaching methods for the experimental class were no different from the control class’ s except the experiment class needed the students to recite and imitate the important knowledge which have learned last class during this class. At the end of this semester, the researcher chose the four reading comprehensions from teacher’s book and student’s workbook to examine their scores of English reading for the second test. It was found that the students’ reading abilities in two classes had improved to a certain extent after this semester, but thereading scores of two classes’ had no significant difference. Therefore, the researcher did the Independent Sample T Test for the post-test of the reading scores of two classes. The result was that the mean of the experimental class was significantly higher than the control class’ s and the difference is obvious. Then the researcher verified that the teaching method based on memetics and language input hypothesis played an effective role, and could stimulate the students’ interest in English reading.This paper includes five parts: background introduction of the paper, literature review of memetics and input hypothesis, research methodology, data analysis and conclusion. And in the conclusion’s part, the researcher also wrote down some limitations and proposed some implications and teaching suggestions for further study.