A Case Study Of Classroom Lead-ins At Changchun Children's Foreign Language Schools

Lead-in, as an indispensable section of a class, can not only arouse the students' desire for knowledge but also draw their attention to the class (Wang Dabao 2001). As the importance of lead-in in classroom learning has been realized, researches on lead-in, both at home and abroad, have been emerged in an endless stream. Most of the researches, however, are conducted in regular schools, and few studies in training schools. To supply this gap, this study, expecting to find the lead-in features of the experienced teachers in the training schools, has tried to analyze the status quo of the experienced teachers' lead-in in the training schools.Based on Kranshen's Input Hypothesis, the study, analyzing the transcription of the class recordings quantitatively, is conducted among 18 experienced teachers and 336 younger learners (aged from 5 to 14) from two influential children foreign language training schools by using the software of AntCon, and FIAS as research instruments. The quantitative analysis includes four aspects: the proportion of lead-in to the whole class; teachers? speech rate in lead-ins; type- token ratio of teacher talk in lead-ins; and the ratio of teacher talk and student talk to lead-in.The results of the data analysis suggest the following conclusions: a. lead-in parts made by the experienced teachers at children foreign language training schools are not lengthy and dilatory, which demonstrates the feature of conciseness; b. most of the experienced teachers in children?s foreign language training schools would enhance speech rate and enlarge the speech vocabulary with the growth of learners? age and the degrees of English learning proficiency level, which reflects the feature of applicability in lead-in; c. most of the lead-ins are constituted of both the teacher talk and the student talk, which are neither 'teacher-centered? nor 'student-centered?, which indicates that the lead-in possesses the feature of interactivity.As the research conditions are limited, this study has the shortcomings such as being confined to only two children foreign language schools, small sampling and the limited research time. Therefore, the conclusions made in this study would be improved in more thorough future studies.