A Study Of The Situational Approach To Oral English Teaching In The First Year Of Senior High Schools

Any true communication has a certain situation; if not, it can only be referred to as “falsecommunication”. The application of situational approach to oral English teaching is toflexibly create a certain “situation”, guiding students to have the desire for communication,and thus achieve true communication.This paper presents a study on the application of Situational Approach and pays moreattention to analyzing its influence on oral English teaching in the first year of senior highschool. Based on the analysis of the current situation of oral English in senior high school inChina and the necessity of the reform of the teaching methods, the paper presents a study ofcomparison of two classes from Grade One respectively using Situational Approach and thetraditional oral English teaching for two consecutive semesters. By using a mixed method ofqualitative and quantitative research to compare a test of oral English between theexperimental group and the control group, classroom observations of the two groups as wellas after-class interviews with both teachers and students, the research intends to discuss theeffects of Situational Approach to improve students’ oral English in the first year of seniorhigh school as well as the reasons for it. The raw data collected from the questionnaires areanalyzed quantitatively with the SPSS.The findings of the present research show that the Situational Approach has a significantimpact on students’ oral English ability. This is because students can be brought into a widevariety of true or simulated situations through the Situational Approach, where they can fulfillmeaningful communication, freely sharing or exchanging opinions, feelings and information,rather than “false communication”, just speaking English in traditional class or “nocommunication”, simply training some grammar items. Furthermore, their positivity to learnEnglish has gradually been raised; autonomous learning ability has greatly been improved;and students’ oral English is more and more fluent and accurate. More students gradually dareto speak English. They are even willing to speak and eventually capable of speaking. Theresearch findings could be enlightening to oral English teaching in the first year of senior highschool.