A Study On Lead-in In Rural Junior Middle School English Classrooms

Lead-in,as the first step of teaching,exerts great influence on enhancing students’ learning efficiency in English class,and it helps to activate students’ thinking,inspire students’ learning interest and so on.Successful lead-in in English class can inspire students’ learning desire,maintain focus on particular teaching tasks and eventually contribute to a good learning result.However,the current situation of lead-in in junior high school English classroom teaching is not satisfactory,especially in rural middle schools.Due to the students’ poor English level and the examination-oriented atmosphere,rural teachers pay much attention to the explanation of language points.Therefore,the lead-in part has been ignored and it failed to fulfill its’ function.In view of this,based on constructivism theory,schema theory and Krashen’s input and affective filter hypotheses,the thesis adopts qualitative and quantitative research to explore the characteristics of lead-in performed by rural junior high school EFL teachers in English class,to access whether teachers’ lead-in practice match students’ expectations on lead-in in English classroom teaching and to explore the factors that causing the discrepancies.It is hoped that through this study,we can have a clearer understanding of the implementation of lead-in in rural junior middle schools,and to find out the problems in the lead-in section and put forward some reasonable pedagogical suggestions.The author conducted this research in Fuhong junior high school in Chengdu.The research objects including 5 English teachers and 184 students in Grade Seven and Grade Eight.By adopting instruments like,classroom observation,questionnaire and interview,the paper is committed to exploring the following two questions:(1).What are the characteristics of lead-in performed by rural junior high school EFL teachers in English class?(2).Are there discrepancies between teachers’ lead-in practice and students’ expectations on lead-in in English classes? If yes,what are the reasons of those discrepancies?After three-month research,the author summarizes the characteristics of lead-in performed by rural junior high school EFL teachers in English class as the follows:(1).Lead-in methods are fixed and some classes have no lead-in section.(2).Length of lead-in is inappropriate.(3).Students’ participation towards the lead-in part is inactive.Later,the research showed that there are significant discrepancies between teachers’ lead-in practice and students’ expectations on lead-in in English classes in following aspects: teachers’ and students’ views on the function of lead-in;teachers’ and students’ views on the application of lead-in;teachers’ and students’ views on students’ needs on lead-in and teachers’ and students’ views on lead-in methods used in class.At last,the study concludes these discrepancies could be attributed to three factors: teachers,teaching condition and students.From the perspective of teachers,the reasons are: ambiguous understanding about the objective of lead-in;“teacher-centered” teaching model in lead-in section;ignorance of students’ needs and poor teaching professional literacy.From the perspective of students,the reasons are: differences in students’ learning style,short attention span and lacking of confidence.From the perspective of teaching condition,modern teaching technology has not been well utilized in English classes of junior high schools.