The Contrastive Study On Lead-in Activities Of High Quality English Classes And Normal English Classes In Junior High Schools

Lead-in activity is the starting of classroom teaching.Although it takes only a few minutes,it plays an important role in setting the tone of the whole class.Effective lead-in activities can create good learning atmosphere,arouse students’ attention to learning content,stimulate students’ thirst for knowledge and enthusiasm for learning,establish links between the old and the new knowledge,clarify learning objectives,and improve classroom efficiency.This requires teachers to have excellent abilities and skills of lead-in.However,there are many problems in the actual English lead-in activities in junior high school,which reduce the effect of lead-in activities greatly.In order to help front-line junior high school English teachers improve the design of lead-in activities and the class effect,this study took classroom lead-in records as the research object,selected 12 English classes from the 13 th junior high school English classroom teaching observation training courses and 12 normal English classes in Guanxian junior high schools(including 6 classes from a county junior high school and 6classes from a town junior high school).The author observed the lead-in activities and recorded the lead-in activity observation scales from four dimensions.The four dimensions are the characteristics of the lead-in activity,the relevance between the lead-in activity and the text,the characteristics of teacher talk in lead-in activities,and the performance of students in lead-in activities.The theoretical basis of this study is Krashen’s affective filtering hypothesis,Ausubel’s meaningful learning theory and Gagne’s information processing learning theory.By using classroom observation method,text analysis method and comparative research method to compare and analyze the statistical data and the text transfer of the classroom lead-in records,this study tried to find out the similarities and differences of the classroom lead-in activities of high quality English classes and normal English classes in junior high schools in the four dimensions,and accordingly put forward suggestions for improving the level of classroom lead-in activities of normal English classes in junior high schools.This study found that the overall level of classroom lead-in activities of high quality English classes in junior high schools is relatively high.Most teachers of high quality English classes can accurately control the duration of classroom lead-in activities,use standardized,accurate,and effective classroom language,and flexibly use multiple lead-in methods to design lead-in activities closely related to the text.The lead-in activities were targeted,interesting,enlightening,flexible.Students were enthusiastic and highly engaged.Finally,classroom lead-in activities played a variety of functions.However,there were some problems with the lead-in activities of normal English classes in junior high schools.A considerable number of teachers didn’t use the target language adequately.The inspiration and interest of the lead-in activities needed to be improved,and students’ cooperation and participation were insufficient,resulting in unbalanced lead-in functions.Of course,in this study not all the lead-in activities of the high quality English classes in junior high schools had a higher level than the normal English class,and some high quality classes were not as good as the normal class in some aspects.Based on the above findings,the author proposes the following suggestions: Firstly,primary and secondary school English teachers should pay attention to the design of classroom lead-in activities.Secondly,teachers should enhance their theoretical literacy,try boldly,comprehend with heart,and strive to be research-oriented teachers.Thirdly,lead-in activities have no fixed methods.The methods with superior effectiveness are good methods.The methods should adapt to local conditions,and be flexible and adaptable.Fourthly,the duration of the lead-in activities needs to be controlled,but there is no fixed standard for the most appropriate duration,and the teaching effect is the basis for evaluation of the duration.