A Study On English Writing Teaching In Senior High School Based On Memetics

Writing teaching is an important part of English teaching.The ability of English writing is an important index to measure English learners’ comprehensive ability.According to the English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2017),senior high school students should attain five levels in English writing,that is,students can describe time and characters,use appropriate formats to complete practical writing,etc.However,many students can not meet the requirements of the curriculum.Although they have mastered a certain number of English words and grammar,they are unable to write correctly.Besides,there are many errors in vocabulary,grammar and discourse structure.Therefore,how to improve senior high school students’ English writing level is a great challenge for teachers.It is necessary to find some effective teaching methods to improve this situation.Many scholars at home and abroad have proposed to use Memetics to guide English writing teaching.Researchers believe that any information which can be copied by imitation in a broad sense,it can be called a meme.While words,phrases,sentences and texts in language can be imitated,copied and disseminated to become a linguistic meme.Therefore,a meme has great significance and value in improving students’ imitation,recreation and communication.It provides a feasible way to solve the writing problems of senior high school students and can be fully utilized to improve the teaching effects of English writing.Guided by Memetics,referring to the relevant theories and teaching research results at home and abroad,and aiming to cultivate students’ writing ability,this study designed a teaching experiment,which mainly solved the following three problems:1.What effects does writing teaching based on Memetics have on students’ interests?2.What effects does writing teaching based on Memetics have on students’ ability of language expression?3.What effects does writing teaching based on Memetics have on students’ ability of discourse organization?In this study,41 senior high school students in Tongshan Middle School are selected as the subjects,and the experiment is conducted for 12 weeks by means of test,questionnaire and interview.Before the experiment,the writer sends out pre-questionnaires to investigate students’ writing interests,and collected students’ monthly exam compositions in September as the basis for the pre-test.In the experiment,the writer conducts a nine-week writing teaching experiment based on Memetics for students.After the experiment,the writer organizes the students to take a post-test of writing.In order to increase the reliability of the experimental test and control the variables in the process of the experiment,the difficulty of this test is roughly the same as that of the pre-test composition.After that,the writer conducts post-questionnaires and interviews with students to deeply understand the students’ interests in writing teaching based on Memetics and the changes of students in writing ability.Through experiments and analyses of the collected data,the results of this study showed that: Firstly,writing teaching based on Memetics has significantly changed students’ interest in writing,and students actively participated in writing activities.It stimulated students’ interests in writing.Secondly,writing teaching based on Memetics enriched students’ vocabulary diversity,enhanced students’ awareness of using various vocabulary,and improved students’ accuracy of using tense and voice.Thirdly,writing teaching based on Memetics improved students’ discourse organizational competence,and enhanced their awareness of designing paragraphs and topic sentences reasonably.In addition,students can use appropriate conjunctions to express the logical relationship among sentences.