A Study On Lead-in Activities From The Eighth National Senior High School English Teaching Demonstration Classes

Lead-in activities are of great value to the whole classroom teaching process. Short as they are, successful and effective lead-in activities contribute a lot to effective English teaching. Lead-in activities can activate students’ prior knowledge, enliven the atmosphere of classroom teaching, arouse students’ attention, stir up students’ interest and enhance their motivation. Thus lead-in activities can improve teaching effectiveness.There are various lead-in ways teachers usually employ in daily teaching. However,are these lead-in ways appropriate enough to activate students’ prior knowledge, enliven the atmosphere of classroom teaching, arouse students’ attention, stir up students’ interest and enhance their motivation? This paper chose seventeen teaching cases from the Eighth National Senior High School English Teaching Demonstration classes(These seventeen outstanding teachers, chosen from seventeen different provinces, are typical teaching samples) as research participants, trying to figure out: How many teaching methods are employed in the seventeen teaching cases? What features do these lead-in methods have? What factors are there affecting effective lead-in activities?After watching the videos of the seventeen classroom performances the author made recordings of these lead-in activities detailed, and transcript them into texts. Then,the author tried to make a tentative attempt to analyze the processes of these lead-in activities in details. The author made comparisons among these lead-in activities from some microscopic perspectives, such as time, lesson type, topic, strategies, activities,coherence to the material and students’ responses, students’ knowledge, students’ emotions, students’ skills, etc. Next, the author generalized the features of these lead-in activities employed by the seventeen teachers, and the factors affecting effective lead-in activities. Based on the analysis, the author found that these lead-in activities have their own different features and characteristics. Furthermore, all these effective lead-in activities are affected by the following factors:1. The time these lead-in activities cover is controlled properly, not to be too long or too short.2. These lead-in activities play a significant role in improving students’ learning interest, activating students’ prior knowledge and stirring students’ learning motivation.3. These lead-in activities are usually innovative, instructive and attention-catching.4. These lead-in activities are designed to be consistent with the new topic.5. These lead-in activities bring great changes to students’ knowledge, students’ motivation and students’ kills.This study can be of a great help to Senior High English teachers design their lead-in activities more detailed and effectively. However, this paper also has some limitations, allowing room for further research.