The Situational Approach 情境教学法

The Situational Approach which is also called the audio visual approach means creating and using many kinds of scenes to make students immerse themselves in the oral English environment which is abundant, natural or half-natural. Moreover, the method makes students have a direct contact with English culture. In other words, the Situational Approach can be comprehended that in the English teaching process teachers establish teaching scenes through language descriptions, material object demonstrations, music exaggerations and sons to stimulate students’ study initiative and enthusiasm. The Situational Approach brings students specific active environment which enables students to imagine emotionally and make students have a superiority exciting center, thus the students can obtain the best attention, which stimulates students’ interest, guides the reassignment in study and stirs up students’ enthusiasm of exercising to enhance the quality and effect of English class. Students’ cognition has the situation connection. The specific scene influences not only help students to understand significance of the activities but also the possibility of the activities, meanwhile it also affects students’ consciousness as well as the method of studying, and it makes the students keep the knowledge in their mind deeply.

There are several characteristics of the Situational Approach. First, its language teaching begins with the spoken language. Material is taught orally before it is presented in written form. Second, new language points are introduced and practiced situationally. Third, vocabulary selection procedures are followed to ensure that an essential general service vocabulary is covered. Fourth, items of grammar are graded following the principle that simple forms should be taught before complex ones. Fifth, reading and writing are introduced once a sufficient lexical and grammatical basis is established.

The Situational Approach has two main advantages. One is that the situation designed can help students to understand the target language more easily and deeply, the other one is that it focuses on the whole structure of the language teaching, makes class atmosphere active, and cultivates students’ ability of expressing themselves naturally and aurally. There are also two disadvantages. One is that mother tongue is completely excluded from class, so it is not good for students to understand the materials used in class completely, and the other disadvantage is that over emphasizing on the whole structure leads to unclear understanding of the linguistic details.