Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Background of the Research

With the high speed development of knowledge economy and information society,society pays more and more attention to English education at the stage of compulsoryeducation, which makes teachers and students focus on it. As one of the informationcarriers, English has become one of the most widely used languages for the people in allthe fields of life. Especially with the arrival of the Olympic Games in 2008, strengtheningand promoting the English teaching has become an adaption to the needs both in domesticand abroad. In recent years, the reform of English teaching has become unprecedentedactive in our country and has sprung up “Crazy English”, “Free English” and “ZhangSizhong Teaching Method” and a large number of results. They have carried on teachingexperiments from their perspectives and its theoretical evidence is also in greatabundance .These trials have achieved success to some extent. But the effect is not ideal inpopularization and application. Especially in recent years, with the development offunction method, many teachers have changed their traditional teaching ways, which isgiving priority to simple teaching knowledge. They begin to pay attention to trainingstudents’ ability of using language .The teachers start to design some interesting activitiesin class. And with the help of pictures, video and games, students’ ability of using languagehas improved. Although the condition has changed, in fact it is not optimistic: Someteachers still use the traditional teaching methods. The process of teaching-receivingmethods of teaching words and expressions makes a mistake of emphasizing on the spreadof rational knowledge and undervaluing the accumulation of emotional experience. Thereis little interaction between teachers and students. Even the practice is mechanical, likeQuestion and Answer, which aims to practicing the sentences, memorizing words.

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1.2 Purpose of the Research

Formulated by the ministry of education foundation，the outline of basic educationcurriculum reform emphasizes that the content and structure of the course is closely adaptto the changing students’ life experience and it is established both by teachers and students.Now one of the basic ideas of the New Curriculum Standard is adopting activities andadvocating experience. It advocates that the students can achieve the goal of the task andfeel successful with the guidance of teachers through perception, experience, activity,participation and cooperation. And the emotion and strategy can be adjusted to the processof learning. As a result, students can form a positive learning attitude and improve theability of language application. Our English teachers must have the courage to renew theidea, dare to innovate, break the traditional rules of teaching and form their own teachingstyles. The most important in English teaching is to attach great importance to the designand organization of class activities and focus on the development of students’ cognition,emotion and association by a breakthrough of the classroom teaching, thus reflects thesustainable development idea of student-orientation in education. With the guidance of thisidea ,we has made some achievements, but there are many hidden dangers: In order toincrease the graduation rates, many teachers still rely on “forced-feeding” teaching patternto force students, which has a result of both the teachers and students being tired.

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Chapter 2 Literature Review

2.1 Concept of Situation

From the perspective of the etymology in Modern Chinese Dictionary ， theexplanation of “situation” is that it has the same meaning of “scene” and it refers tospecific occasions , situations and positions.From the perspective of pedagogy, situation in the dictionary of education has such adefinition: situation is the symbolic interaction theory analyzing interpersonal process. Themeaning of situation mainly has three layers: First, the whole social situations includingindividuals, groups and the attitude, personal interpretation and perception of socialsituations about the objective environment; Second, the impact on individuals is not onlyaffected by environment, but also affected by subjective views; Third, personalinterpretation of social situation is various and its direction and concrete behavior is alsovariable, which has an influence on their personality development.Li Jilin who advocates Situational Teaching in our country has used “situation” onsituational teaching. She thinks it has a rich connotation. And she points out that“situation” refers to the products of “scene” and “environment” and it is the subjective andobjective fusion state of situational environment and it is different from generalsituations(1999:4-5). Situations in situational education refers to the first creation in theprocess of education, but it is worth noting that situation in situational education is aninteresting network of broad space, which links to teachers and students.

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2.2 Concept of Situational Teaching

Situational Teaching Method has been known as spoken method when it just appearedin foreign countries and it was very popular in the 1950 s in England. As time went by, theword “situation” was adopted. According to the idea of Pittman (1963), “situation” refers ademonstration of using examples, objects, images, sign body languages and other teachingaids. And teachers can achieve new knowledge of project language explanation, followedby repetition and substitution drills. In the 1950 s, the representative figure of SituationalTeaching Method Hornsby used “Situational approach” for many times. Structuralsituational approach and situational approach became generally known later. In the early1980 s, Jack C. Richards and Theodore S. Rodgers had a book The School of Languageand Teaching. The authors had summarized the characteristics of the Situational TeachingMethod for the first time .To avoid confusion, they adopted Situational Language Teaching.Since then, SLT become the pronoun of Situational Teaching Method. Situational TeachingMethod is the origin of English teaching. And it is used in multiple disciplines in thedevelopment of China. So each scholar has different definitions.

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Chapter 3 Design of the Research ..... 20

3.1 Research Questions ..... 20

3.2 Purpose of the Investigation ...... 20

3.3 Participants of the Investigation ....... 21

3.4 Survey Tools ......... 21

Chapter 4 Collection and Analysis of the Data....... 23

4.1 Data Collection ..... 23

4.2 Analysis of the Data..... 23

4.3 Interview and Discussion .......... 34

Chapter 5 Conclusion .......... 39

5.1 Major Findings and Pedagogical Suggestions....... 40

5.2 Limitations of the Research....... 41

Chapter 4 Collection and Analysis of the Data

4.1 Data Collection

The questionnaires are distributed in three classes of three grades in two schools,Wenxuan Middle School and NO.4 Middle School, totally six classes. The author issues 64and 69 questionnaires in the first grade in Wenxuan Middle School and NO.4 MiddleSchool respectively, 69 and 62 in the second grade respectively and 65 and 70 in the thirdgrade. 399 test papers were distributed to the three grades in two schools and 390 paperswere collected and the effective rate was 97.7% .There is 48 pieces of questionnaires to theteachers and all of them are recycled, and the percentage of recovery is 100%. In theprocess of distributing questionnaires, people who distributed questionnaires illustrated thepurpose and definition of Situational Language Teaching Method in advance andemphasized that there was no name on it, so that the privacy of both students’ and teachers’would not be disclosed, which could make the respondents have a good coordination. Dueto the restriction of the course arrangement, the teachers’ questionnaires were not releasedat the same time, but distributed and collected at an agreement time. After the end of thequestionnaire, the interviews included both teachers’ and students’. The teachers’interviews were conducted in teachers’ office at the free time after work. The authorexplained the purpose of the interviews to each other and had a record in the notebook afterthe permission of the teachers’. Because the problems were relatively short, the time of theinterviews for each teacher was in about 15 minutes. The Interviews of students wereconducted in three times and they were asked about four to five students to sit togetherafter class. The time of interviews was about 15-20 minutes or so and the interviews werealso written down.

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Conclusion

This thesis investigated the application of Situational Language Teaching Method injunior middle school English. And the survey suggests that this method is very popularwith teachers and students in junior middle school. And teachers and students all agreewith the high interesting of this method. Teachers consider the use of this method canimprove students’ interest of studying English and it can gain a high degree of cooperatingwith students. So does the high efficiency. Teachers’ preference of using Situational Language Teaching Method is different fromstudents’ expectations. Because of the different roles and positions of teachers and students,teachers prefer to use this method in teaching vocabularies and teaching reading toimprove teaching efficiency and to obtain a better teaching effect. In contrast, more thanhalf of students want their teachers to use it in phonetic teaching to meet the needs ofindividual development.

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Reference (omitted)