An Instructional Design Of Topic Leading-in For Junior English Classes

Classroom is presently the major organization for English teaching in China, and English classes are subsequently the main places for all students. So as a full English lesson is like a complete movie, the leading-in of a certain lesson is like the trailer of the movie. The audience will only be attracted by the well-organized trailer, both for a movie and for a lesson. Only when the students' interests are motivated, when they know exactly what they are going to learn, and when they move from what they learned previously to the new things, will the following steps develop more efficiently. However,in practice, not all the teachers pay enough attention to this step. Even if they know how significant leading-in is, they seldom try new methods to start a lesson. Most middle school English teachers start their lesson by experience rather than a detailed design.What's more, most teachers concern more about ways of explaining knowledge in each lesson instead of how to start that lesson. The deficient design of leading-in causes a casual lesson start so that the leading-in may have not been well-targeted and interesting as it could have been. Meanwhile, some teachers tend to jump over the leading-in and start a lesson directly with which most students are not satisfied. These leading-ins have been found resulted in “under-leading-in”, and shall be closely concerned.In order to find out the basic situation of leading-in in present middle school English classes, the author interviewed 9 junior middle school English teachers and 20 junior middle school students about leading-in in junior English classes. Based on the conclusions of previous research and the analysis of the result of the interview in it, the author found out that the reason of low efficiency of leading-in is the traditional way teachers start a lesson, which is, leading-in by revision. This is not well accepted by the students. Also, repeating a same way of leading-in for too many times will cause the students to become less interested and less curious. Based on Situational Approach andthe schema theory, the present study attempts to solve the problems by designing a set of leading-ins according to the topic of each lesson, which includes four instructional designs for four separate units.The main results of this study are as follows:First, two volumes of English text book of eighth-grade published by The People's Education Press can be reorganized according to topic classification, so can teachers starts a lesson in varied way as the topic changes. Secondly, no leading-in can be carried out without Situational Approach and the Schema theory. The former serves as a method and the latter as a goal. Thirdly, on the one hand, methods of leading-in should always be diversified as well as interesting. On the other hand, ways of leading-in should be changed when topics become different. Topics of science and technology and culture can be led in by asking questions, anecdotes, pictures or short videos. Topics of arrangements are better led in by small talks, stories or puzzles. Topics of descriptions can be started with discussions, interview or debates. Topics of instructions serve for practice so lessons of such topic should begin with actions. Playing games or acting on the stage can be good choices and sometimes it would be better if mix them up when necessary. In short,the most significant finding of this thesis is that based on the classification of topics of teaching material, methods of leading-in should be changed accordingly.