A Study On The Application Of Memetics To English Vocabulary Teaching And Learning In Junior High School

The importance of vocabulary is self-evident in English teaching and learning.However,the researches show that Chinese junior high school students don’t performance well in vocabulary learning.The traditional vocabulary teaching method does not play a significant role in improving students’ interest in vocabulary learning.Thus,helping students to learn English vocabulary more effectively has become an important issue for many researchers.This paper applies the memetics teaching method to junior high school students’ vocabulary teaching and learning and uses empirical research to probe the effectiveness of this method.Memetics is a new explanation for culture evolution coming from Darwinian Evolution.There is a close connection between the meme and language.From the viewpoint of memetics to observe the language and the related phenomena,it can be found that the memetics not only can reveal the rules of language developments,but also offer a new idea for English language teaching.According to the essence of meme and its life cycle,this study attempts to explore the influence on junior high students’ vocabulary learning.In order to achieve the research purpose,a three-month long empirical experiment was carried out at two eighth grade classes of a public school in Hangzhou.Class 1 is the experimental class and class 2 is the control class.Students from the experimental class received a three-month long memetics teaching method while students from control class received the traditional vocabulary learning method.In order to find out whether the memetics teaching method can help students to learn vocabulary,the vocabulary test is the main research instrument,and the interview is the supplementary instrument in this research.After the data was collected,the analysis was done by using SPSS 16.0 and EXCEL.This study was designed to address the following three questions:(1).How can memetics teaching method help to improve vocabulary learning?(2).What kind of words will be learned effectively with memetics teaching method?(3).How can memetics teaching method affect different levels of students?The results show that:(1)The memetics teaching method enhances students’ vocabulary learning interest and initiative.(2)The memetics teaching method can prolong students’ memory,especially for the long-term memory,meanwhile,it can guide students to use the new words in an appropriate way.(3)The memetics teaching method helps to learn the nouns and the verbs the most.(4)Intermediate and low level students benefit more in the memetics teaching method.