A Survey Study On The Use Of Lead-in Strategies In Senior High School English Classes

In recent years, effective classroom teaching is of great concern to many researchers and educators. Therefore, the flexible application of effective teaching in different levels of English classes has gradually become a hotspot in the field of pedagogical researches. Lead-in, as the first phase of English teaching, is supposed to alleviate the anxiety of learners to acquire new knowledge effectively, thus increasing the teaching efficiency greatly. However, despite a number of attempts to highlight effective teaching in English class teaching, there are still relatively few researches on lead-in phase in senior high schools. Therefore, it is necessary to do some research on the present situation of the use of lead-in strategies, the degree of satisfaction of teachers and learners towards lead-in strategies and the factors affecting teachers’ choice of employing different strategies of lead-in in senior high school English classes.This study is conducted to find out the general situation of the use of lead-in in senior high school English classes. The theoretical bases of this study are humanism and constructivism. The research questions to be addressed in this study are as follows:1) What is the present situation of the use of lead-in strategies in senior high school English classes?2) What is the degree of satisfaction of teachers and learners towards the use of lead-in strategies? What are the most popular and acceptable strategies of lead-in?3) What are the factors affecting teachers’ choice of employing different strategies of lead-in?The research design involves three methods:observation, questionnaire and interview. In the observation, sixteen classes in the Senior Two in a four-star high school are selected as subjects for a month. The data were collected in November, 2014. Data analysis involves statistical method to find out the present situation of the use of lead-in in senior high school English classes.Questionnaire survey is also conducted in this study. The subjects are the students from the two parallel classes selected from Grade Two in the senior high school. Under the guidance of her supervisor, the questionnaire is designed by the author herself after she consults several experts. Questionnaire survey is conducted after the classroom observation. Data are collected by the author herself and data analysis involved statistical description in terms of frequency and percentage.Besides, semi-structured interviews are conducted to further verify and replenish the information obtained from the questionnaire. Altogether 9 teachers and 10 students are selected from those whose questionnaires are considered valid to participate in the interview. The questions in the interview are closely related to lead-in phase and are designed under the guidance of her supervisor. Interview of teachers is conducted in the office after class and interview of learners is conducted in the classroom after classroom observation.The research concludes that:1) In senior high school English teaching classroom, teachers generally use various strategies of lead-in, among which connecting link lead-in, direct lead-in and raise question or suspect lead-in are of the highest frequency for being brief and easy to operate; besides, teachers consider it necessary to employ lead-in strategies in English classes and combine different strategies of lead-in and add extra materials or contents to lead-in phase; 2) In senior high school English teaching, there still exists room for improvement on the degree of satisfaction, to clarify, whether the lead-in phase can connect old and new knowledge, arouse learners’ interest, enhance learners’motivation or alleviate learners’ anxiety; learners are interested in various lead-in strategies, among which connecting link lead-in, cultural background lead-in, free talk lead-in and story-telling and experience-sharing lead-in are most popular; 3) In senior high school English teaching, there are various factors affecting teachers’choice of employing different strategies of lead-in, such as type of lesson, lead-in content, teaching material, learners’proficiency level, learners’ characteristics and teaching conditions.It is obvious that a successful lead-in helps to improve the learners’efficiency in English learning in senior high schools. Thus, as teachers, under the guidance of learner-centered humanism and constructivist learning theory, they should manage to lead in effectively so as to cultivate an open, friendly and unthreatened learning environment, to enhance learners’ motivation towards English and thus to construct effective classroom teaching.Of course, due to the limitation and insufficiency of the author’s practical and theoretical level, this study definitely has some shortcomings and remains to be further improved. Due to limited amount of data collection, the present study may not represent the overall situation of senior high school English teaching. Besides, on account of teachers and learners’ evolving English proficiency and the author’s changing competence on research over time, future researches may not get a relevant result with the present study. Lastly, owing to the limited length of the thesis, the author selected present situation, degree of satisfaction and affecting factor as the pointcut.