A Study On The Lead-in Activities Of Senior High English Classrooms By The Excellent Teachers

Classroom teaching is the main channel for students to learn English, and it is alsothe main form for the teaching work. Lead-in, which plays an important role in Englishclassroom teaching, is also the most basic and important step in the teaching procedure.Although it does not last long, its significance can never be overestimated. Welldesigned lead-in activities can attract the students’ attention directly, arouse theirlearning interests, make them study actively and devote themselves to the classroomteaching in a better state. It can also help teachers to improve the efficiency of Englishteaching. However, the main standard of evaluating teaching quality has remained thetest scores at present, which leaves senior English teachers with no alternative butbeing committed to knowledge infusion rather than designing classroom activities. Itmeans that they often pay less attention to lead-in activities in English class. Therefore,the effect of lead-in is not satisfactory. Besides, the research about lead-in of seniorhigh school is quite sporadic in China so far, lacking enough empirical studies.This thesis aims to have concrete studies on lead-in activities of senior highschool to find out the existent problems and to solve them by adopting effectivemeasures. The research takes the video of16high quality excellent teachers’ realteaching cases of senior high school English classrooms from the National Seventh andEighth Session of Senior High School English Classroom Teaching Seminar which washeld by National Association of Foreign Language Education Society. Based on theAssimilation Theory for constructivism learning and the findings from the relevantstudies about the methods of lead-in, the researcher wants to explore effective methodsof lead-in and principle of effective lead-in activities to guide normal English teaching.Based on theoretical foundation and statistical analysis, this thesis focuses on theevaluation of the classroom observation of the excellent teachers’ high quality realteaching cases. With the help of text analysis that record interview with experiencedteachers, this study intends to evaluate the lead-in activities and provide answers to thefollowing research questions: (1) What kinds of lead-in strategies do the excellent English teachers usuallyadopt?(2) What’s the teachers’ role in class viewed through the excellent teachers’ designof lead-in activities?(3) What’s the principle of effective lead-in activities?In order to answer these questions, this research applies both quantitative andqualitative approaches and the whole evaluation procedures. This thesis consists of fivechapters. In Chapter one, the author expounds the background, purpose, significanceand structure of the present study. Chapter two is the part of the literature review,where the author discusses the theoretical foundation of lead-in in English teaching andsome correlative issues, such as the definition, purpose, and function of lead-in andalso the basic requirements of lead-in activities. Besides, some previous studies athome and abroad are presented here. Chapter three is the research methodology. Theobjective, subjects, instruments and methods are presented. Chapter four is the resultsand discussion. By means of classroom observation and interview, the authorsummarizes the theoretical basis, strategies, principles, functions and teachers’ roles inlead-in activities. This part is the main body of my thesis, which solves the researchquestions. The major findings of this thesis are clarified below:(1) The main lead-in strategies that the teachers use can be summarized as thefollowing five: Visual or Multimedia Lead-in, Catechetics Lead-in, Situational Lead-in,Background Knowledge Lead-in, and Free Talk Lead-in.(2) Through the excellent teachers’ design of lead-in activities, the teachers’ rolescan be clarified as organizer, controller, designer, promoter, resource of knowledge andthe participator of class.(3) The principles of effective lead-in activities are that the lead-in should betargeted, fresh, inspiring, concise and interactive.Chapter five is the findings and suggestions. It concludes with the types ofeffective methods of lead-in and its important practical significance. Besides,limitation of this research is pointed out and further research plan is put forwardfinally.