Application Of Situational Techniques In The Teaching Of English Speaking For Vocational Students

With speaking English becomeing more and more important in job and daily life, more and more English teachers have been making their great efforts to improve students'speaking competence. It is more urgent in our vocational schools, as the feedback from the employers shows their great dissatisfaction with the speaking ability of our graduates.To study the effective and feasible way of improving vocational students'speaking competence, an investigation was made by interviewing the colleagues and the vocational teachers in other vocational schools to find out the popular methods adopted in their speaking course. The result is that the traditional way of"teacher explanation plus students imitation"is still the most widely adopted model in their speaking classes, no matter what the reason might be. The situational techniques including audio-lingual aids and situational activities are seldom practiced. Therefore, the teacher is the only active actor in the classroom.From B. Malinowski.'s theory of context of utterance, context of situation, context of culture, to Firth and his student, Halliday's theory of intratextual context and intertextual context, these linguists stressed the significance of speaking context of language. H. G. Widdowson pointed out that in normal language use contexts crucially interact with semantic meaning and pragmatic meaning, which should be carried out by situations. David. W. Carroll classified the speaking process into four steps and we found that situations help these four steps, especially the first two. With the significance of situations in speaking language, together with the situational techniques'features fitting with vocational students'state, the situational techniques including audio-lingual aids and situational activities are explored and illustrated to improve vocational students'speaking competence defined by Jermy Harmer. After practicing these situational techniques for a whole semester, a half-opened interview was made to find out the feedback from students. The positive answers on the adoption of these techniques confirm the great benefits on the psychological and affectional state of vocational students, the negative answers provides great advice on improving the adoption of these techniques as well. Besides suggestions on the preparation and practicing situational techniques, the teacher's role in the class must be adjusted to ensure its effectiveness.