Situational Approach: 3 useful things

Three useful sides of the Situational Approach in Language Teaching

by O. G. P.

Subject: Teaching English as a Foreign Language: Methodology I

In this essay I will talk about what I consider the three most useful sides of the Situational Approach (S.A.). Though I consider a downside that it retains a number of mistakes in the tradition of the imperative psychological school at that time (i.e. behaviorism and its concepts), I think that this method offered innovational proposals with respect to Foreign Language Teaching.

The first step forward, in my view, was the contextualizing of linguistic samples; something that the former major methods had apparently disregarded at all. The idea that “any language item, whether it be a structure or a word, should not be presented in isolation” (Nagaraj 1996:14), is something that every language teacher should remember during the teaching-learning process, provided that we can learn new parts of language when there’s a well-established context for any student of the L2. An advantage of this is that it also allows the students to practice inductive thinking (which is necessary when learning a language), and may possibly give them the facility to prevent an excessive use of dictionary. This is nowadays related to the context clues activities.

Another key point is the importance of teaching the most common words of every-day language. This, unarguably, is a vital factor in the language learning process. So much, that, today, lexical frequency is understood to be a paramount factor for the understanding and study of psycholinguistic phenomenon, since it has an intrinsic relationship with cognitive functions of language (Peña-Casanova, 2007:61).

The third most useful side of the situational approach is the acute mention of meaningful learning. The idea of “Structures and vocabulary selected… initially presented orally and in meaningful situations and then practiced orally in similar situations” (Nagaraj 1996:17) is really worth-considering. The very concept of “meaningful learning” today is usually associated with the constructivist theory of learning, and the fact that the S.A. held this idea even before the spread of the former, really demonstrates that this method was meant to be an upfront move towards a broader visualization of language learning.

As I see it, the S.A. does represents a progress in ELT. Though there are things that it overlooks, and though I would do some important modifications, (i.e. especially, to discard the use of behaviorist techniques), I would certainly adjust the key concepts here discussed and apply them in order to improve the quality of the learning-teaching process.

References:

• Nagaraj (1996) English Language Teaching: Approaches, Methods, Techniques. Orient Blackswan. ISBN: 8125007512
• Peña-Casanova, Jordi (2007), Neurología de la conducta y neuropsicología, Madrid, Ed. Médica Panamericana, junio 30, 409 págs.