An Investigation Into Lead-in In Senior High School English Teaching Classes In Ganzhou Middle School

lead-in is the first step in the English classroom teaching, which takes up about one-ninth time of a whole class; Even though it is not so long, it is of great importance and significance especially in arousing students' interests, focusing their minds, and involving them into the class. However, under the circumstance of College Entrance Examination, many English teachers point it out that lead-in wastes time and has few effectiveness, so they often ignore the lead-in part. Besides, Although the idea of lead-in has put forward since the seventieth of the twenty century, and some researchers have been made some progresses about this in theoretical aspects. However, the research on the practical teaching classroom is still not enough. Therefore, the author has made a research of the lead-in in Ganzhou Middle School, and try to find out the current problems of lead-in in English classroom teaching of senior high school and put forward some useful suggestions.To investigate the current situation of lead-in in English classroom teaching of senior high school, the author adopted three research instruments, that is classroom observation, questionnaire and interview. Firstly, the author observed 40 English classes without intervention and tried to observe the general situation and the existing problems of lead-in in real class. Secondly, two questionnaires were adopted and were handed to 51 English teachers and 210 students randomly ranging from Grade One to Grade Three. Through collecting and analyzing data from questionnaire, this paper tries to find out the perceptions of teachers and students towards lead-in in the English teaching classroom of senior high school. Lastly, the author interviewed 20 English teachers and 30 students randomly selected to have a further understanding of the present situation of lead-in.The results shows that: 1) Although most of teachers and students admitted the importance of lead-in, some of them did not put their perceptions of lead-in into the practical English teaching. That means, some teachers still never designed lead-in, and some students did not pay attention to the lead-in part in the real English classroom teaching. 2) Some teachers did not put the students on the position of equality and ignored the students' subjectivity in lead-in activity. 3) Lead-in materials did not got rational exploitation.According to the existing problems appearing in the lead-in part of English classroom teaching in senior high school, this paper tries to put forward some practical suggestions for English teachers: 1) highlighting the concept of student--centered; 2) Paying attention to the features of lead-in; 3) paying attention to the validity of lead-in contents; 4) acquiring sufficient knowledge. At the meantime, some implications are given for students: 1) enhancing awareness of lead-in; 2) increasing confidence of learning English; 3) grasping every opportunity to improve English competence ability.