The Application Of The Situational Teaching Method In Cabin Crew Spoken English Teaching

With the globalization of world economy, there is a close relationship between countries. The airlines which are considered as a main means of transportation play a very important role and show a thriving and prosperous trend. With the blossom of the aviation industry, the passengers have higher requirements of the airline services which are highly measured by cabin attendants’English communicative ability. It is considered as the premise and prerequisite of a qualified cabin attendant who is compared to the window of airlines. But the current situation is that the English levels of cabin attendants in domestic airlines are generally on the low level. They even cannot do well in their English broadcasting which makes both them and the passengers in an embarrassing situation. In view of the above, it is urgent and necessary to find a way to develop students’Spoken English level in aviation service vocational college.Under the guidance of Humanistic Teaching Theory and Constructivism, the situational teaching method was applied to the Cabin Crew Spoken English Course, and a teaching experiment was conducted trying to answer the following questions:1) Whether the situational teaching method helps to increase the students’interest and stimulate their motivation in learning Cabin Crew Spoken English?2) Whether the situational teaching method contributes to the improvement of cabin crew students’ Spoken English level including both fluency and accuracy?3) Whether the situational teaching method helps to familiarize the students with the working process in their future job and improve their problem-solving ability?In this thesis, two instruments were used by the author including tests and questionnaires. Two sophomore cabin crew classes were chosen for this experiment. One was selected as control class, the other one as experimental class. Both of the classes took the same textbook named "Cabin Service English". Before the experiment, the author gave the pre-test to the five classes of grade2013in the cabin crew department, and then chose two classes with the highest score and similar spoken English level. The pre-questionnaire was also taken before the experiment focusing on the aspects of the students’learning interest, motivation, present learning conditions and their opinions on the Traditional Teaching Method. In the control class, the author kept using the traditional teaching way, while in the experimental class the situational teaching method was adopted. It took one semester (about four months) to do the teaching experiment. Four months later, the students in these two classes took post-test according to the content of the textbook. The post-test was taken in an airline cabin simulator which aimed to put the students into the real environment of their future job to find out whether their spoken English level had been improved. There was another set of evaluation about their professional skills in order to find out whether they could be qualified for the job as a cabin attendant. In addition, post-questionnaire was done focusing on the students’ changes in attitude and interest to spoken English after the application of the situational teaching method.At the end of this thesis, the author pointed out some major findings as well as some implication and limitation of this research and gave some suggestions to facilitate the further study.