ALR B3 | The Situational Approach Flashcards
‘The material of the language lesson,’ wrote _____ in 1961, ‘is not language, but life itself; the language is the
_____ we use to deal with the material, slices of experience’.
Lionel Billows, instrument
One form that these ‘_____’ take is the situation, and the Situational Approach was originally conceived as a way of making the situation ‘the material of the language lesson’.
slices of experience
Out of the
experience of transcribing their day-to-day talk, he concluded that language use is entirely _____
context-dependent
‘_____ and _____ are bound up
inextricably with each other and the context of situation is indispensable for
the understanding of words’ (1923).
Utterance, situation
Malinowski’s insight was picked up by a number of (primarily British)
linguists. As one of them worded it, ‘to be a member of a _____ is to know what _____ fits what situation’ (Mackey 1978).
speech community, language behavior
It was left to others, such as Michael Halliday, to attempt to
identify the ways that situational (or _____) features are encoded (i.e. _____) in language – a project that culminated in his Introduction to
Functional Grammar (1985).
contextual, expressed
Meanwhile, the _____ of this ‘situated’ view of language were not lost on applied linguists.
pedagogical implications
Pit Corder (1966) wrote that ‘one can perfectly well envisage theoretically a course which had as its starting point an inventory of _____ in which the learner would have to learn to behave verbally’.
situations
Lionel Billows’ Techniques of Language Teaching (1961) outlines the
principles that underpin this approach. In order to ‘_____’ language
learning, Billows proposes a system of _____, radiating out
from the learner’s immediate context (e.g. the classroom) to the world as directly experienced, the world as _____, and the world as indirectly
experienced through texts.
situate, concentric circles, imagined
Billows argues that we should always seek to
engage the _____ circles by way of the _____ ones.
outer, inner
Teaching based around a syllabus of situations is best remembered in the form of the _____, popular in the teaching of French.
Audio-Visual Method
However, it soon became apparent that ‘situation’ was too loose a way of categorising language in use, and, at best, was only good for generating a kind of ‘_____’ approach to syllabus design.
phrase book
So, apart from in some
‘_____’ courses for beginners, and in ESP courses (such as English for business people), the situation was largely abandoned as an organizing
principle.
survival
Instead, it was co-opted into grammar-based courses in the _____ tradition (see chapter 4), in the form of what Louis Alexander
called ‘_____ situational teaching’, i.e. ‘teaching a language by means of a series of everyday situations while at the same time grading
the structures which are presented’ (1967).
Oral Method, structurally controlled
English in Situations by Robert O’Neill (1970) further consolidated the basic model, in which the situation is simply a context for presenting the _____.
grammar
The basic learning principle at work is that of _____, i.e. from the examples of a grammatical structure in a text or _____ (typically presented orally), the learners work out the rules of its _____ and use.
induction, dialogue, form
The pattern may then be displayed in the form of a _____, and is
consolidated through successive stages of _____, beginning
with _____.
substitution table, controlled practice, imitation drills
Class must have chance to gain insight into when to use _____.
_____ represent typical instances.
pattern, Situations
From these, they can generalise
about use of pattern. Teacher may also decide to give _____. However, this is not enough in itself. […] _____ can be helpful but cannot be substituted for student’s own insight.
formal rule, Formal rules
The ‘_____’ – i.e. a situation which generates several
instances of the target structure – has provided legions of language teachers
with an alternative to _____ or _____ as a means of presenting
grammar.
generative situation, translation, explanation
As the first ‘move’ in the PPP (_____)
lesson structure, it satisfies the need for a lesson planning template that enshrines a tight logic – and one that finds some validation in _____ learning theory, i.e. the theory that declarative knowledge (knowledge-that) becomes
proceduralized (i.e. converted to knowledge-how) through practice.
presentation-practice-production, skill
Moreover, the use of guided discovery procedures in order to encourage learners to work out the rules themselves confers a degree of _____ on learners that earlier methods, such as the Oral Method, lacked.
agency
On the other hand, the somewhat rigid lesson format of the _____, with its emphasis on the accurate reproduction of pre-selected patterns, along with the artificially contrived contexts for presentation, is not a huge advance on the _____ (see chapter 6), with which it shares many beliefs about learning and language.
situational approach, Audiolingual Method
In the light of recent developments in educational theory, which argue that
all _____ is ‘situated’ (Lave & Wenger 1991), it may be time to revisit the Situational Approach as originally conceived, i.e. where the situation is not simply a context (or _____) for presenting grammar, but is the central organizing _____ in course design.
learning, pretext, principle
his is particularly relevant now that
digital technologies have effectively dissolved the borders between the
_____ and ‘_____’ situations.
classroom, real life
For example, mobile devices allow
learners to record interactions in the outside world for later analysis in the
classroom, such as exploring the ways that language choices and the ‘_____’ impact on one another.
context of situation
And _____ now provides increasingly more detailed descriptions of the kind of language
that is used in specific situations – not just the vocabulary and grammar, but the particular features of _____ and _____.
corpus linguistics, register, style
The way that language varies according to situation suggests that, in the end, all language use is ‘______’, and that language teaching, therefore, is preparing learners to use
language for ‘_____’.
specific, specific purposes
