Study on English Vocabulary Teaching from the Perspective of Memetics

DOI

10.2991/iccessh-19.2019.91How to use a DOI?

Keywords

memetics; English vocabulary teaching; interest; vocabulary learning strategies

Abstract

As the famous linguist Harmer (1990) said, "If we compare language structure as the skeleton of language, vocabulary provides it with the most important organ as well as blood and flesh". Obviously, vocabulary plays a crucial role in language learning. However, it has been shown that vocabulary learning is one of the weakest links in English learning for most students in China and a great majority of students have difficulties in words learning because traditional vocabulary teaching mode can't arouse students' interest, they often feel difficult and bored; as a result vocabulary becomes a big challenge for them. Memetics, based on Darwin's evolutionary viewpoints, is a new theory that explains cultural evolution, meaning that information is copied from one human brain to another by imitation. The theory, which mainly inspects language and related phenomena, not only reveals the rules of language developments, but also offers a new idea for English language teaching. By studying its origin and definition, lifecycle and transmission mode, this paper will adopt mechanism of language meme to teach English vocabulary and focus on developing students' interest in vocabulary learning and cultivating students' vocabulary learning strategies so as to improve the efficiency of English vocabulary teaching and learning.

Copyright

© 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Panpan Cao
PY  - 2019/07
DA  - 2019/07
TI  - Study on English Vocabulary Teaching from the Perspective of Memetics
BT  - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Contemporary Education, Social Sciences and Humanities (ICCESSH 2019)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 395
EP  - 400
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/iccessh-19.2019.91
DO  - 10.2991/iccessh-19.2019.91
ID  - Cao2019/07
ER  -