The Effects Of Lead-in On Students' Involvement In Senior High School English Class

Lead-in is the activity that teachers carry out at the beginning of a lesson or before teaching the new content.It lasts no more than 3-5 minutes.However,as the first step of the teaching process and it plays a rather important part in it.As the saying goes,“ A good beginning is half done”.An effective lead-in activity can clarify the teaching objectives and teaching tasks,besides,it can complete the structure of a lesson.What's more,a successful lead-in can help the students to enter the lesson with preparation and arouse the learning interests and motivation of the students,thus improving students' involvement in class.The experts at home and abroad have done lots of researches and studies about lead-in and students' involvement respectively,but the study of the relationship between lead-in and student involvement,which is the theme of this study,is one in a thousand.The theoretical basis of this study is Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development and the Input Hypothesis and the Affective Filter Hypothesis of Krashen.In order to make the English teachers attach more importance to the positive role of the lead-in activities in teaching process and help them to make full use of it,the author carried out the study in Jigang Senior High School of Shandong Province.The subjects of this study including 103 students and 10 English teachers from Grade one of the school.This study mainly presents 3 questions: 1)How can the lead-in activities of English lesson in senior high school affect students' involvement? 2)What kind of lead-in activities do students like ?What kind of Lead-in activities can improve students' involvement in a English lesson? 3)How can English teachers make the lead-in activities more effective?The results of this study show that:1)An effective lead-in activity can arouse students' learning interests,thus improving their engagement in English classroom;2)Students are interested in all of the lead-in activities that are mentioned in the thesis;The lead-in activities with meaningful content and flexible forms can improve students' involvement in class;3)Most of the English teachers are aware of the importance of lead-in,but some of them can't make full use of it in their teaching practice.According to the results of the study,the author puts forward the following suggestions forEnglish teachers: 1)Teachers should learn the knowledge of lead-in systematically,combining the theoretical knowledge with their teaching practice;2)Take the various influential factors into consideration when designing the lead-in activities;3)Teachers should design the lead-in activities according to certain of the principles and make them more effective;4)Teachers should remember that the time of the Lead-in activities should be limited in 3~5 minutes.The factors that have influence on students' involvement can be various.Teachers should try their best to improve the level of students' involvement.