A Study Of Lead-in Strategies In English Listening And Speaking Class At The Level Of Junior High School

With the New Curriculum Reforms in full swing, teachers are expected to follow the trend of the times, unceasingly renew their education ideas in the process of teaching and adopt a wider variety of teaching strategies to meet the teaching needs. As the prelude of a new class, lead-in part has been receiving more and more attention. As a famous proverb goes, "A good beginning is half done". This sentence applies equallyto teaching. A well-designed lead-in can stimulate students’interest and motivation, bring their initiative and enthusiasm into full play, pave the way for the following teaching activities and finally improve the teaching efficiency. However, research on lead-in in China is not systematic, and most of them are derived from the teaching experience. In practical teaching, many teachers often fail to make the best of lead-in strategies and accordingly the teaching effects are weakened. Moreover, according to the literature review, it is observed that research on lead-in in English listening and speaking classroom teaching is barely touched. Therefore, it is practically significant to conduct a research on the lead-in part of English listening and speaking classroom teaching. In this paper, classroom observation, questionnaires and interview are employed by the author for data gathering which can help find out the main lead-in strategies teachers adopt in junior high school English listening and speaking classes. Then the data collected will be analyzed in detail. The author hopes that the research findings will help those English teachers who are in the forefront of teaching make better use of the lead-in strategies. In this case, the teaching efficiency will be greatly improved and the class will run more smoothly.This paper is made up of five chapters. Chapter One is about the introduction, it mainly includes the background, significance and the framework of the study. Chapter Two mainly talks about the literature review. This chapter is composed of three parts. Part one mainly concerns with definition, functions and principles of lead-in. Part two mainly deals with the relevant theoretical foundations about lead-in. Part three involves the related research status at home and abroad. Chapter Three is about the key elements of research design part. It consists mainly of the research questions, participants, instruments, research methods and data gathering. More specifically, through observing the lead-in part of English listening and speaking classroom teaching at Taizhou Bilingual School, and by the questionnaires and interviews designed towards 216 students and 6 English teachers, the author intends to find out the popular lead-in strategies in English listening and speaking class, the actual implementation effect of lead-in, the main existing problems of lead-in and teachers’and students’attitudes towards lead-in. Chapter Four chiefly concerns with the data analysis and discussion. In other words, the generalization and analysis of the original data collected from the questionnaires and interviews and classroom observation. The Last Chapter is about the conclusion. It is the summary of the research, it mainly puts forward the implications, limitations and prospect of the further study.