Situational and Communicative Methods in Teaching English
理論研究
作者：胡玥
Abstract： In English teaching， teachers should help students to overcome many problems by useful teaching method. The author mainly discusses the difference between the two methods by the historical background， origin， function and role. Both SLT and CLT can be used to teach English， but we need to compare them， evaluate them and adapt principles that suit to our own teaching situation best.
Key words： English teaching， Situational Language Teaching， Communicative Language Teaching， students’ problems
The origins of Communicative Language Teaching （CLT） are to be found in the changes in the British language teaching tradition dating from the late 1960s. Until then， Situational Language Teaching（STL） represented the major British approach to teaching English as a foreign language. In Situational Language Teaching， language was taught by practicing basic structures in meaningful situation-based activities. But just as the linguistic theory underlying Audiolingualism was rejected in the United States in the mid-1960s， British applied linguists began to call into question the theoretical assumptions underlying Situational Language Teaching. This was partly a response to the sorts of criticisms the prominent American linguist Noam Chomsky had leveled at structural linguistic theory in his now classic book Syntactic Structures. Chomsky had demonstrated that the current standard structural theories of language were incapable of accounting for the fundamental characteristic of language—the creativity and the uniqueness of individual sentences. British applied linguists emphasized another fundamental dimension of language that was inadequately addressed in current approaches to language teaching at that time—the functional and communicative potential of language.
Situational language teaching
Reading and writing are introduced once a sufficient lexical and grammatical basis is established， while Situational Language teaching uses a structural syllabus and a word list. Structures are always taught within sentences， and vocabulary is chosen according to how well it enables sentence patterns to be taught. The practice techniques employed generally consist of guided repetition and substitution activities， including chorus repetition， dictation， drills， and controlled oral-based reading and writing tasks.