| With the promotion of the new curriculum reform, New English Curriculum Standards demandsteachers to update their teaching concepts and improve teaching ways to adapt to the requirement of newcurriculum reform. Lead-in as the first step of a class, plays an important role in the process of teaching.“Well begun is half done.” Lead-in is the first and foremost part at the very beginning of a class which aimsto attract students’ attention, arouse their interest and learning motivation, produce strong desire forlearning and fully mobilize students’ initiative and enthusiasm to learning in order to make learningeffective. However, a number of teachers lay emphasis on explaining language points, ignoring lead-in ordesigning this part without requirements of New English Curriculum Standards. The review of the theoryand the survey of the previous studies show that few studies have been conducted on lead-in in Englishteaching in Senior High School with comparision. Therefore, it is of practical significance to make a studyof lead-in in English teaching in Senior High School. Nevertheless, using lead-in does not mean enhancingthe effectiveness of teaching, so teachers should employ proper lead-in ways according to lesson types,students’ needs and interest so as to achieve a good teaching effective.Based majorly upon the previous study, this research aims to investigate and analyse the lead-in waysin English teaching in Grade One of Senior High School and moreover it attempts to find out the lead-inways teachers are employed in class and the popular lead-in ways in students’ eyes. The reason why theauthor chooses senior high school students of Grade One as research subjects is that Grade One of SeniorHigh School is the transitional stage from Junior Middle School to Senior High School. According to theresearch objectives, two research questions are proposed:(1) What lead-in ways are usually employed byteachers in Grade One of Senior High School EFL classes?(2) What are the popular lead-in ways in GradeOne of Senior High School EFL classes? Based upon the questions, this research takes a number ofstudents and teachers, who are from No.31Middle School in Zheng Zhou city, Henan province, as itsresearch subjects. Four main research methods are involved in this study: classroom observation andaudio-recording, research questionnaires and interviews.The investigation finds that based on the frequency of using lead-in ways from high to low that teachers usually employ are Multi-media lead-in, Setting Questions lead-in, Using Pictures lead-in,Revision lead-in, Free-talk lead-in and Background Knowledge lead-in. And as for the popular lead-inways, students prefer to Multi-media lead-in, Situation lead-in, Playing games lead-in, Using Pictureslead-in, Setting Questions lead-in and Story, fable, aphorism, old sayings lead-in in turn.The thesis is composed of five chapters.Chapter One is the introduction of the present research. It includes the following three aspects: theresearch background, the research objectives, and the overall structure of this thesis.Chapter Two is the literature review. It summarizes the definition of lead-in, the functions of lead-in,the principles of lead-in and ways of lead-in, represents the studies on lead-in abroad and at home andintroduces the theoretical basis on lead-in as well.Chapter Three is research design, which includes the following four parts: research questions, researchsubjects, research methods and data collection.Chapter Four presents the results and the analysis of this study. This chapter mainly analyses theresults from the classroom observation and audio-recording, and discusses the questionnaires and theinterview respectively.Chapter Five is the conclusion of this study. This part first makes a summary of the major findings ofthis study. In addition, this chapter also gives some pedagogical suggestions for the English teachers. Lastly,it presents the limitations of this study and discusses the prospects for the further research in this area. |
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