A Study On Lead-in Strategies In Demonstration English Classes Of Junior High School

As a Chinese poem goes, “If we want to get clear water for the channel, we need to have the running water from the source.”. “The running water” is to “a channel” what the lead-in activity is to junior high English teaching. The lead-in activity is the initial part of junior high English classroom teaching, which, as the “running water”, has great influence on the effect and atmosphere of the whole lesson. The lead-in activity is also called lecture beginning, which appears in the form of “warming up” in classroom teaching sometimes. It refers to the teaching activity before teaching new contents within three to five minutes at the beginning of a class. But in the actual junior high English classroom teaching, lead-in activities tend to be formal or be developed in a hurry, and even some teachers ignore lead-in activities and tell students the learning contents directly. Lead-in activities have the function of “ A good beginning is half the battle” in English classroom teaching, which affects the atmosphere and efficiency of the whole English lesson. An excellent lead-in activity is an important part of excellent teaching designs, which can attract students’ attention at the start of class, stimulate students’ learning motivation, arouse students’ enthusiasm, participation and curiosity, create a positive and harmonious atmosphere of teaching and learning, so as to improve the teaching efficiency. The demonstration classes have a guiding role for normal classes, from which other English teachers will learn a lot for their everyday English teaching, especially lead-in strategies in the demonstration classes. Thus they can design reasonable lead-in strategies according to the different teaching contents and finally benefit their students.The main research instruments of this paper include literature research and class observation. Guiding by Krashen’ Input Hypothesis, D. Ausubel’s Cognitive Assimilation Theory and the other relevant studies of the effective strategies of lead-in activities and the proper roles of teachers, the researcher takes 31 teachers from demonstration junior high English classes in the Tenth National English Session of Junior High School English Classroom Teaching as participants and tries to demonstrate lead-in activities in the video to transfer the text. Based on this, the researcher wants to explore the effective lead-in strategies, the reasonable teachers’ roles and the situation of students’ classroom involvement in lead-in activities then to guide the normal English class. The thesis provides answers for the following three research questions: What are the effective lead-in strategies that teachers usually use in junior high demonstration English classes? What are teachers’ roles in lead-in activities? What is the situation of students’ classroom involvement in lead-in activities?The results show that: 1. In the junior high demonstration English classes, teachers can adopt appropriate lead-in strategies and design corresponding lead-in activities according to the differences of class types, teaching contents, teachers’ personal teaching styles, and students-centered methods. Most teachers combine various lead-in strategies and adopt lead-in strategies by using pictures, free talk and questions and answers, which is more advantageous to make lead-in activities vivid and attract students’ attention to concentrate on learning and to realize the effectiveness of English classroom teaching. Some teachers use music and games to lead in, which can develop the interaction between teachers and students, arouse learning interest of students and make classroom activities lively. 2. In the junior high demonstration English classes, not only teachers orientate their roles reasonably, but also teachers’ roles are diverse. Teachers mainly play the roles of designers, organizer and regulators. The diversity of teachers’ roles is better for teachers to choose multiple lead-in strategies and design effective lead-in activities, in order to develop the students-centered teaching. 3. The degree of students’ classroom involvement is greatly varied and the amount of teachers’ words is more than students’ classroom discourse in demonstration English classes. Some lead-in activities are popular to students, such as music lead-in, video lead-in and games lead-in, in which students take part in these activities actively. Judging from the reaction of students in a variety of lead-in activities, it can be found that students prefer to enjoy the open and relaxed environment created by teachers with modern technology, at the same time, students do not abandon participating in the traditional classroom activities. Even students are more depending on the traditional activities in the poor performance of the innovative forms of lead-in activities.It can be seen that demonstration English classes can guide normal classes. In the process of English classroom teaching, junior high school English teachers need to draw lessons from the demonstration English classes to design reasonable lead-in activities, according to different teaching contents, to take students-centered views and to position reasonable roles, so as to improve the classroom involvement of students and the efficiency of English teaching.