A Study On Lead-in Strategies Of Senior High School English Teachers

As the first step of teaching,lead-in plays an indispensable role in English classes.Although it doesn’t take much time,it has an invaluable effect in some ways.As the saying goes,well begun is half done.Effective lead-in can attract students’ attention,arouse their interest and curiosity and help them build connections between the old and the new.It is ultimately aimed to get the students ready for the following learning tasks both cognitively and psychologically,which will contribute to improving the teaching efficiency.However,there are several problems in practical lead-in teaching.For instance,a handful of teachers tend to implement lead-in for its own sake without taking the teaching content and learning situation into consideration.Or students are not fully involved in lead-in activities.Consequently,it’s hard for the teachers to achieve the expected results.Besides,the existing studies on lead-in strategies in senior high English classes are mostly dealt with the summary of lead-in strategies and principles of lead-in strategies based on teaching experience,short of empirical studies.Meanwhile,the majority of scholars don’t pay attention to as many aspects as possible during the process of classroom observation,making the data incomprehensive and the results unpersuasive.Therefore,the author selected sixteen senior high English teachers from Wuhan Foreign Languages School as participants to solve the following three research questions:(1)What kind of lead-in strategies are mainly used in senior high English classes?(2)What are the existing problems with the use of lead-in strategies?(3)How to improve the effectiveness of lead-in?The author has investigated the situation of lead-in strategy use in Wuhan Foreign Languages School,and made a further analysis and summary of the strategies used by the teachers in an attempt to provide some references and suggestions to lead-in teaching in senior high schools.The main methods used are classroom observation and case analysis.Detailed records are made on each lesson in terms of the following dimensions:lesson type,topic,lead-in time,lead-in strategy,lead-in steps and students’ response.And some representative teaching segments in the recorded materials are transcribed into written form,which are used for further analysis.The study finds that:(1)There are altogether seven strategies used by the teachers,namely multimedia,questions,free talk,background knowledge,key words,revision and story.Those strategies are used in combination more often than not.Still,multimedia is the most favored one among the all.(2)Most of the classes have a reasonable design of lead-in,but some problems exist,including inappropriate time allocation for lead-in and failure to connect with the lesson topic or to give full scope to students’ initiatives.(3)Teachers should design and implement lead-in based on the following principles:focused,learner-oriented,inspiring and time-efficient.Based on these findings,some implications are put forward.First,the teacher should develop a right idea of relevant issues on lead-in.Second,they need to master a variety of lead-in strategies based on a thorough exploration of teaching objectives and teaching content.Third,lead-in should be centered on the students.Last,teachers should raise the consciousness of time scheduling on lead-in.