If you search through my archives of TESOL materials, you'll notice that I've used the term "lead-in" repeatedly. But I've never bothered to define it. It's a very classic CELTA term, so I've often just assumed that other TESOL teachers would know what I meant.
However, recently I've been on a mission to define all the terminology that I use on this blog. So I should probably talk about what exactly a "lead-in" actually is.
A "lead-in" is an activity that is used at the very beginning of a reading or listening lesson (*). The main purpose of a lead-in is to get the students interested in the topic of the reading/listening text. A secondary purpose might be to activate the students pre-existing knowledge about the topic.
In its most typical form, a lead-in would consist of a conversation prompt that relates to the students' life in some way, but also relates to the topic of the reading or listening text.
So, for example, imagine the listening text is a conversation between two people about a party that they went to. A lead-in could be, "Talk to your partner about the last time you went to a party. Where did you go? What did you do? Did you have fun?" et cetera.
The students would then spend a couple minutes talking to their partner about a party that they went to. And, in theory, after they've had the opportunity to relate the topic to their own life, this will make them more receptive to listening to a conversation about the same topic.
Now, obviously this approach works best with reading or listening texts which are about everyday life topics. It gets a bit harder to devise interesting lead-ins when the reading or listening text is about some more exotic topic not related to students' lives (looking at you, National Geographic textbooks). But with a little bit of creativity, you can usually devise some sort of personalized speaking prompt that relates to an aspect of the reading/listening text.
So, for example, when I had to do a reading lesson on Alaskan Ice Climbing, and I knew none of my Vietnamese students had ever gone ice-climbing, the lead in was a mingle activity in which students talked about the most dangerous thing they had ever done (see here and here). It was stretching things a little bit, but it was the best I could think of. (The examples in the slideshow were supposed to stimulate ideas, and were my attempt to include both exotic dangerous activities as well as mundane dangerous activities--e.g. riding a motorbike without a helmet is relatively common in Vietnam.) I probably could have done a better job of making it relevant to the students' lives, in retrospect, but you get the idea.
So, to summarize, the ideal lead-in is a short conversation prompt which relates both to the reading/listening and to the students own lives.
2 or 3 questions is probably the limit. You usually don't want to go overboard and give the students a whole page full of questions. (Although, if you look through my archived materials, you can see I've sometimes been guilty of this in the past--see here, for example.)
And the lead-in works best when it's a personalized speaking prompt. We want students to be talking and to be active. Often there's a temptation to find a really interesting Youtube video on the same topic, and use that as your lead-in to try to pique student interest, especially when your teaching a reading/listening on a specialized topic (see, again, the National Geographic textbooks). But this is usually a bad idea. (As J.J. Wilson says in How to Teach Listening, your lead-in to a listening text shouldn't be another listening activity. It'll just exhaust students.)
...although, once again, this is another mistake I've definitely been guilty of in the past. If you search my archives, you can find plenty of lessons when I've used Youtube videos as lead-ins. But it's something I'm trying to do less of now.
As far as setting up and running the lead in:
Just like any other stage in a lesson, the "lead-in" is usually structured in the following way:
1) Set up the task
2) Students do the task
3) Feedback on the task
We'll go through these steps briefly below:
1) Set up the task
The set-up should ideally be short and sweet. The teacher should give out the speaking prompt, and possible give a brief personal example to illustrate. In order to avoid excessive Teacher Talking Time, and to increase student involvement, it's always best to elicit the example as much as possible.
Pictures work best for this, if at all possible. For a hypothetical illustration, let's go back to the example above with the lesson about parties. Before the lesson, I would dig around for old photos of myself in Facebook or Google Photos, etc. I would find photos of me at some party. I would put the photos on a PowerPoint. But then instead of describing these photos, I would use eliciting questions to get the students to describe the photos to me. e.g. "Look at this picture? Where am I? What am I doing? Who am I talking to? Am I having fun?"
Once I've used the eliciting questions to get students to describe the picture of me at a party, I would then say, "Okay, talk to a partner. When did you last go to a party? Where was it? Who did you talk to? Did you have fun?"
Now, obviously all of this is an ideal set-up. (It assumes I have a classroom with a computer and a projector, pictures of myself that I can locate, a topic that lends itself to personalization, etc). But sometimes it does all work out. And in those cases, I think this is the ideal way to set up the lead-in.
For a real example of this, see my lesson on Rosie's Walk. The reading text is about a walk that somebody goes on. So for the lead-in, I have the students discuss a time that they walked somewhere. And for the example, I include real photos of me on a walk (see slideshow here) and I get the students to describe the photos to me.
In other cases, if you don't have the perfect photo of yourself in that situation, you can just use stock photos from Google Images to elicit from students. So, for example, this lesson. The listening text was on plans for the weekend. So the lead-in was that the students talked about their own plans for the weekend. So I gave the students an example from my own life but I used generic pictures to elicit all the activities (see slideshow here).
2) Students do the task
The students are assigned a partner. (According to CELTA methodology, the teacher always assigns the partners--ideally quickly. e.g. "You two together, you two together, you two together, a group of three over here.")
During the task, the teacher listens in, and notes which students have stories that would be suitable for whole class feedback. (e.g. if you overhear one student say to her partner that she's never been to any parties, and she doesn't have anything to talk about, then you want to make sure that you don't call on that student during the whole class feedback.) The teacher should not interfere with the speaking activity, unless the students ask for support.
3) Feedback on the task
As an experienced CELTA tutor once told me, you should never give any language related feedback during the lead-in (i.e. don't correct any language mistakes--grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation--that the students make during the lead-in.)
This is for a few reasons:
1) the purpose of the lead-in is to get students interested in the lesson, and we don't want them to start tensing up and worrying about correction already.
2) The nature of the feedback should always be related to purpose of the lesson stage. The purpose of the lead-in is to generate ideas, so the feedback should be related to ideas, not language accuracy.
3) The students haven't yet been taught anything at this stage of the lesson, so it's not fair to correct them on anything yet.
So, ideally, don't do any language correction during the lead-in stage. (**)
Instead, the teacher would nominate one or two students to share their answers with the whole class.
As mentioned above, the teacher should use their notes to make sure they call on students who actually have something to say (and avoid embarrassing students who don't have suitable responses.)
The teacher should then give some sort of brief comment on the content of the student's response, (e.g. "That sounds like it was a very fun night out. Thank you for sharing"), but avoid commenting on the language accuracy of the response.
Notes:
(*) The exception to this would be that some teachers like to do a quick game to review the language from the previous lesson. This serves the purpose of (1) warming the students up and getting them ready to study, (2) reviewing the material from the previous lesson, and helping to cement it into their permanent memories, (3) allowing for late-comers to come in and get settled in the first 10 minutes, without missing any crucial parts of the main lesson.
In these cases, the lead-in would be the second activity of the lesson, not the first. But it would still be considered the first stage of the "main lesson".
(**) A possible exception to this would be if you have a group of students who request more language correction throughout the lesson. (Some students want the teacher to provide constant correction. This tends to be more of an issue with highly motivated adult learners, and less of an issue with teenagers and young learners.) In this case, you might select one or two language accuracy issues to give feedback on during the lead-in. It's not the CELTA methodology, but in the real world the methodology is always negotiated with the needs of the particular students.
(The only thing to be careful about, though, is to make sure that everyone in the class wants the increased correction. In some cases, it could just be a couple students who are more vocal than their classmates, and the majority of the class actually doesn't want the increased correction.)
Lead-in for Grammar and Vocabulary Lessons
I should mention that lead-ins are also used for grammar and vocabulary lessons. This is during the presentation stage of the lesson. In these cases, the lead-in is for the context, not the grammar point.
You see, in the CELTA method, the sentences used to illustrate the grammar point are not just random sentences. Rather, a context is selected in which to present the grammar point, and the sentences come from that context.
So, for example, in this lesson on "going to future", the context is plans for the weekend and all the examples of "going to" come from that context. So, the lead-in, then, is "talk about your plans for the weekend".
It's important to remember that the lead-in is a lead-in to the context, and not a lead-in to the grammar itself. Resist the temptation to try to sneak the grammar point into the lead-in. The lead-in is purely about getting students interested in the context. Drawing attention to the grammar will come later.
For a classic example of when I screwed this up, see this this Lesson For Quantifiers on Countable and Uncountable Nouns. In my lesson plan, I had the first stage classified as a lead-in, but it was actually a sorting activity for countable and uncountable nouns, which was previewing the grammar point, and not a lead-in to the context. (The context was the difference between the countryside and the city.) As my manager pointed out after he had observed the lesson, the real lead-in to the lesson was when I had the students discuss the difference between the city and the countryside (lesson plan here, slides here). The city and the countryside discussion was the context in which I was illustrating the quantifiers (e.g. "not much pollution", "not many buildings" etc), so getting the students to discuss the differences between the city and the countryside was the actual lead-in, and that's where I should have begun the lesson.
I later used that lesson (or at least a version of that lesson) to illustrate the wrong way to do lead-ins in my presenting grammar workshop.
