Situated Teaching Method In Primary English Class

For years, English has been one of the important subjects in class teaching design.However, English teaching in primary school has been using the traditional teaching method,which is characteristic of explaining grammar and vocabulary in an extremely detailed wayand could not stimulate students' interest and initiative in English learning.Inspired by the previous theoretical and empirical researches on situated teaching, theresearcher made the attempt to bring situations into class so as to increase students' interest inEnglish learning, improve their performance in tests and finally make the primary Englishclass better.The researcher chose40primary school students from New Star Foreign LanguageSchool in Zhouzhi and conducted a six-month experiment. The40students were divided intotwo classes: the control class and the experimental class. In the control class, students weretaught in the the traditional common way while the experimental class were given classes insituated teaching method. In the experimental class, considering difficult and fresh points ofthe materials as well as the characteristics of the primary school students, before class, theteacher designed some appropriate situations such as asking students to wear their favoriteclothes, preparing some daily objects from a department store and animals or fruits pictures,and songs; in class, the teacher designed some situations including asking one student to showwords in gestures and others to guess the words, drawing stick figures and inviting somestudents to perform some actions and asking others questions. Thus, situations would runthrough the whole class including the introduction to class, vocabulary and grammar teaching,and text explanation. During the after-class self-examination, the teacher introspected theconduction and results of the before-class situation design and in-class situation design so asto conclude the better design methods that could be accepted in primary class. During theresearch, the research gave a pre-test and post-test respectively at the beginning and at the endof the experiment and then made a comparative analysis between the control class and theexperimental class. What's more, in order to get more comprehensive information, theresearcher also adopted the instruments of questionnaires, classroom observation andafter-class interviews. It has been found: under situated teaching, students' English scores had gone upobviously and their memory of vocabulary and grammar was better; the scores of the studentstaught in the traditional common way did not show significant increase. Moreover, students inthe experimental class were eager to answer questions in class; they responded more to theteacher; situated teaching method would bring a relaxing environment for English learningand reduce students'negative emotions including nervousness. Based on all above, the thesiscould easily make a conclusion: situated teaching method is suitable for the primary schoolstudents'lively, mobilized and curious characteristics; situated teaching method is suitable forthe primary English class.