A Study On The Common Lead-in Activities And Their Effectiveness In Senior High School English Reading Teaching

Traditional teaching of English in high schools emphasizes the explanation and memorization of words and sentence structures, but neglects the cognitive process of acquiring new knowledge and the development of students’ integrated skills. Under the guidance of the College Entrance Examination and the great pressure of teaching, many English teachers attach so much importance to scores that they go straight to the reading passages as soon as the class begins, which does not contribute to attracting students’ attention or developing students’ mind. In addition, it does not help to improve students’ ability of self-study.Aimed to improve the efficiency of lead-in activities in senior high school English reading classes and change the present situation of spending much time in teaching reading but exerting little influence, this paper mainly explores the following two problems.1) What’s English teachers’ attitude towards the lead-in activities in senior high school reading classes? What methods do they use and why?2) Do the lead-in activities which are reasonably designed have a positive effect on students’ English learning, for example, their state and performance?By doing extensive reading of references, doing questionnaire surveys, interviewing and carrying out experiments, the writer discovers that English teachers’ attitude towards the lead-in activities in senior high school reading classes is closely related to their age. Young teachers tend to adopt various lead-in activities while elder teachers tend to focus on just one lead-in activity or adopt no lead-in activity. Meanwhile, through the research, the writer finds that reasonably-designed lead-in activities do exert a positive effect on students’ English learning state and performance. All these shows the vital importance of effective lead-in activities.The writer puts forward some suggestions on how to design effective lead-in activities based on the actual situation in English teaching after carefully studying other experts’ researches and collecting statistics in this study, hoping to offer some practicable methods for other senior high school English teachers who are under the great pressure of heavy teaching tasks and the College Entrance Examination. With these methods, senior high school English teachers are more likely to help students enhance their motivation of learning English and improve their integrated abilities, thus truly achieving the goal of effective teaching.