An Experimental Study Of The Effects Of Situational Teaching Method On The Oral English Vocabulary Production In Vocational College Students

Situational Teaching is a widely used teaching method in oral English teaching. The proper use of Situational Teaching in English classroom can stimulated students'affective experience, arouse their interest to learn English actively and enhance their willingness in taking part in class activities, all of which will lead to a better effect of English classes.In recent years, there are more and more researches of oral English teaching. The researches abroad on Situational Teaching focus mainly on aspects including the application principles, the development of situational textbooks and the teachers'roles. Meanwhile, the domestic research about Situational Teaching are mainly on strategies and principles for creating situations, and how to use situations to help the students, especially college students or middle-school students acquire language knowledge or language skills. Given the situation, in order to find a teaching method which may effectively enhance the oral vocabulary productivity ability of the vocational college students, this study attempted to apply the situational teaching method to the oral English teaching in higher vocational colleges, and tried to answer the following questions with teaching experiments:1) Will the situational teaching method help to enlarge the vocabulary output quantity of students'oral English?2) Will the situational teaching method help to improve the vocabulary output quality of students'oral English?3) If yes, in what aspects is the enhancement of oral English productive ability reflected?4) Will situational teaching method have positive effect on other aspects of students'English learning?Directed by these research questions, the author selected respectively 30 students from two parallel classes of non-English majors of 2009 in Shandong Vocational College of Industry, and then conducted a teaching experiment lasting for 17 weeks in the two classes (one is the experimental class, and the other the control class), by means of questionnaires and interviews for the empirical study. Situational teaching method is adopted in the experimental class, while the traditional teaching method in the control class. After the experiment, a posttest and questionnaires were carried out, and the results of the pretest, the posttest and the questionnaires were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively with SPSS 13.0The study obtained the following findings:1) The situational teaching method can help to enlarge students' oral English vocabulary output quantity.2) Setting and understanding of the situations may help students to improve the quality of their oral English vocabulary.3) The application of situational teaching may help to improve the students'ability to converse the receptive vocabulary to the productive vocabulary.4) And moreover, the situational teaching method may help students in their English learning from other aspects, such as reading comprehension and practical writing.According to the findings of the research, the author put forward some suggestions on the application of situational teaching method to oral English class correspondingly, and pointed out the limitations of this research and proposals for the future study.