A Study On The Effects Of Memetics-based Lexical Approach On Senior High School Students’ English Writing

Writing is an important productive skill,which can contribute to students’ development of comprehensive competences in English.However,the teaching and learning of English writing in senior high schools is now in a difficult situation.For one thing,traditional Product Approach emphasizes the final product of writing and neglects the cultivation of language skills during the writing process,thus making the teaching effects far from satisfactory.For another,students tend to memorize words and grammar in isolation and makes unidiomatic sentences,failing to ensure fluency,accuracy and coherence in language expressions.To deal with the problem,Zhou(2014)advocated that teachers should incorporate chunk instruction into writing and guide students to express meanings with holistic lexical chunks rather than isolate words.Besides,Lewis(1993,1997)believed that the essence of language was lexical chunk and he proposed Lexical Approach on the ground of Grammar Translation Method(GTM)and Communicative Language Teaching(CLT),providing a new direction for English teaching.In view of this,the present study takes memetics theory as the theoretical perspective,associates lexical chunks with memes and designs a memetics-based lexical approach(MBLA)on the foundation of the life cycle of memes.Meanwhile,this thesis explores the effects of MBLA on high school students’ English writing through an empirical study,and research questions of the study are formulated as follows:(1)What effects does memetics-based lexical approach have on senior high school students’ linguistic accuracy in English writing?(2)What effects does memetics-based lexical approach have on senior high school students’ syntactic complexity in English writing?(3)What effects does memetics-based lexical approach have on senior high school students’ discourse coherence in English writing?To investigate the effectiveness of this approach,the present study adopts both quantitative and qualitative instruments and selects 93 Senior One students from two classes of a high school in Fujian Province as the research participants.Then,these two classes are randomly assigned into Experimental Class(EC)and Control Class(CC).After that,a three-month teaching experiment is conducted with EC adopting MBLA whose main teaching procedures include the following four stages: exploration and identification,internalization and consolidation,application and expression,and interaction and innovation of lexical chunks,which are in accordance with the four aspects of assimilation,retention,expression and transmission in the life cycle of memes,while CC still follows the traditional Product Approach.Moreover,writing tests and interview are taken as the research instruments and specific indexes are chosen to evaluate students’ writing performance.Next,experimental data is analyzed with the assistance of analytical software.Firstly,linguistic accuracy is gauged by calculating the ratio between the total number of errors and all T-units in students’ compositions;Secondly,syntactic complexity is measured from the dimensions of unit length and clausal density,and the index for each aspect is mean T-unit length(MLT)and T-unit complexity ratio(C/T);Lastly,discourse coherence is assessed by latent semantic analysis(LSA)performed in Coh-metrix where the cosine value between sentences is calculated.Major findings are as follows:(1)From the facet of linguistic accuracy,it is found that MBLA can effectively reduce the number of incorrect expressions and improve the accuracy of language,and the most significant change is seen in elementary students;(2)From the aspect of syntactic complexity,this approach plays a positive role in enhancing students’ mean T-unit length in writing,but it exerts insignificant influences on the index of clausal density probably because of students’ relatively low language proficiency at present and their restricted attentional resources;(3)From the dimension of discourse coherence,this methodology can boost coherence in students’ written discourse,especially for intermediate level students.In a nutshell,MBLA is effective in boosting senior high school students’ linguistic accuracy and discourse coherence in their English writings,which is also of certain referential significance for high school English teachers to implement this writing approach and the pedagogical implications of this study can be summarized as follows.First of all,teachers should guide students to focus on diversified lexical chunks and raise their awareness of chunks.Then,teachers are suggested to design various chunk-related exercises and activities to help students internalize,consolidate and apply the lexical chunks they have learned in class.Lastly,teachers had better instruct students of chunk-learning strategies and methods to enhance students’ learning efficiency.