A Study On Petroleum Engineering English Vocabulary Teaching From The Perspective Of Memetics

Vocabulary teaching is the basis and one of the most important parts of English teaching.At present,petroleum engineering English course has been offered in most universities of petroleum.However,petroleum-majored students have too many difficulties to learn this course well.One of the biggest obstacles is vocabulary.Therefore,how to help students grasp petroleum engineering English vocabulary rapidly and solidly is one of the urgent problems to be dealt with,and also is the focus of the research in the thesis.Meme is just a type of "unit of cultural transmission".Language is a kind of meme.Linguistic memetics mainly study language itself and the related phenomena from the perspective of memetics.Meme does benefits to the development of language,and also is replicated and transmitted depending on language.Based on the theory of memetics,three questions are discussed in this thesis.They are:How feasible is the memetic way in the petroleum engineering vocabulary teaching?What's the effect of the memetics-oriented petroleum engineering vocabulary teaching method on students' ability of grasping petroleum engineering vocabulary?Based on the features of petroleum engineering vocabulary,is the memetics-oriented petroleum engineering vocabulary teaching method more effective than the traditional way of vocabulary teaching?In order to demonstrate these questions,memetics and the relations between memetics and language are explained systematically at first.Then,the thesis argues that all elements of vocabulary,including established words,affixes,roots,lexical chunks and the rules of word formation are vocabulary memes.Finally,empirical study on memetics-oriented petroleum engineering English vocabulary teaching is carried out.In this thesis,an empirical research is carried out through a teaching experiment and a questionnaire.Two parallel classes in Petroleum Engineering College of Northeast Petroleum University are chosen to be the experimental subjects.Pre-test and post-test are given before and at the end of the research respectively.All the collected data are dealt with software SPSS19.0.Through the analysis of collected data,some conclusions are reached.They are:the memetic way is very feasible in the petroleum engineering vocabulary teaching;the vocabulary proficiency of students guided by the memetics-oriented petroleum engineering English vocabulary teaching method is improved greatly;the memetics-oriented petroleum engineering English vocabulary teaching method is more effective than the traditional way to some extent.