A Study On "Lead-in" Activities Based On The Demonstration Teaching Of The Eighth National Primary School English

As the beginning part of the whole English class and the most basic step in the teaching procedure,lead-in plays a very important part in primary English classroom teaching.As we know that well designed lead-in activities can draw the students' attention on the class directly,stimulate their learning interests,arouse students' motivation and attract them to the classroom teaching in a better state.In fact,lead-in can also help teachers to improve the efficiency of English classroom teaching.Therefore,although it does not last long,its significance can never be ignored.However,through the class observation about some teachers' lead-in activities in the classroom teaching,on the one hand,for the time saved,it is easily neglected in some English class when some normal classes are observed,especially revision class or grammar class where some teachers attach more importance into the result other than the process.Additionally,many teachers incline to tell the students straightly rather than directing them.On the other hand,for the formalism or lacking in effective organization and strategy of the lead-in,lead-in activities are less or no effective in some English class where lead-in exists only in the form.Of course,the latter is more severe.It means that they often pay less attention to lead-in activities in English class,so the effect of lead-in is not satisfactory.Besides,the research about lead-in of primary school is a few pockets in China so far,lacking enough empirical studies.Therefore,Primary school English teachers need to improve their lead-in skills,but there is a lack of reference for them.This thesis aims to do concrete studies on lead-in activities of primary school to find out the existent problems and to solve them by adopting effective measures.Guided by the assimilation theory for cognitive learning and based on the findings from relevant studies about the methods of lead-in and the suitable roles of the teachers,the research takes the video of 30 high quality excellent teachers' real teaching cases of primary school English classrooms from the National Eighth Session of Primary School English Classroom Teaching Seminar which was held by National Association of Foreign Language Education Society as object and tries to describe the effective measures of organization and strategies about lead-in.Based on the Assimilation Theory for constructivism learning and the findings from the relevant studies about the methods of lead-in,the author would like to explore effective methods of lead-in and principle of effective lead-in activities to direct normal English class teaching.So based on theoretical foundation and statistical analysis,this thesis focuses on the evaluation of the classroom observation of the excellent teachers' high quality real teaching cases.With the help of video observation and text analysis,the author intends to summarize some common features or general characteristics of the excellent English teacher lead-in,and this study intends to evaluate the lead-in activities' effective strategy and organization and provide answers to the following research questions:(1)What kinds of lead-in strategies do the excellent English teachers usually select?(2)What is the teachers' role in class observed through the excellent teachers' design of lead-in activities?(3)What is the situation of students' classroom involvement in lead-in activities?In order to answer these questions,this research applies both quantitative and qualitative approaches and the whole evaluation procedures.This thesis includes five chapters.In Chapter one,the author states the background,purpose,significance and structure of the present study.Chapter two is the part of the literature review,where the author discusses the theoretical foundation of lead-in in English teaching and some relative issues,such as the definition,purpose,and function of lead-in as well as the basic requirements of lead-in activities.Besides,some previous studies at home and abroad are presented here.Chapter three is the research methodology.The objective,subjects,instruments and methods are presented.Chapter four is the results and discussion.By means of classroom observation and text analysis,the author summarizes the theoretical basis,strategies,principles,functions and teachers' roles in lead-in activities.This part is the main body of the thesis,which solves the research questions.The major findings of this thesis are clarified below:(1)The main lead-in strategies that the teachers use can be summarized as the following five: visual or multimedia lead-in,catechetical lead-in,situational lead-in,background knowledge lead-in,and free talk lead-in.Therefore,in primary demonstration English classes,using music and games to lead in can promote the interaction between teachers and students,stimulate learning interest of students and make lively classroom activities more easily.(2)Through the excellent teachers' design of lead-in activities,the teachers' roles can be clarified as organizer,controller,designer,promoter,resource of knowledge and the participator of class.(3)The degree of students' classroom involvement is greatly different and the amount of teachers' utterance is more than students' classroom discourse in demonstration English classes.Chapter five is the findings and suggestions.It concludes the types of effective methods of lead-in and its important practical significance.According to the results,the author suggests the teachers in normal English classroom use the right lead-in organization and strategy as well as a suitable role to improve the efficiency of the primary school English class and stimulate students' interest and develop students' initiative to learn English well.Above all,based on the research of the excellent teachers' lead-in activities,whatever strategies they select or roles they play,they obey the core theoretical direction,which is affective strategy that is built on Krashen's Affective Filter Hypothesis.During the whole lead-in activities,teachers of course use a lot of strategies,of the most importance is affective strategy.However,this study will inevitably have shortcomings,such as the small number of samples and the limited capacity of the author.Therefore,at the end of the study,this paper points out the deficiency of this study and the direction for further research.