ALR B3 | The Situational Approach

Question 1

‘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’.

Answer 1

Lionel Billows, instrument

Question 2

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’.

Answer 2

slices of experience

Question 3

Out of the
experience of transcribing their day-to-day talk, he concluded that language use is entirely _____

Answer 3

context-dependent

Question 4

‘_____ and _____ are bound up
inextricably with each other and the context of situation is indispensable for
the understanding of words’ (1923).

Answer 4

Utterance, situation

Question 5

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).

Answer 5

speech community, language behavior

Question 6

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).

Answer 6

contextual, expressed

Question 7

Meanwhile, the _____ of this ‘situated’ view of language were not lost on applied linguists.

Answer 7

pedagogical implications

Question 8

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’.

Answer 8

situations

Question 9

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.

Answer 9

situate, concentric circles, imagined

Question 10

Billows argues that we should always seek to
engage the _____ circles by way of the _____ ones.

Answer 10

outer, inner

Question 11

Teaching based around a syllabus of situations is best remembered in the form of the _____, popular in the teaching of French.

Answer 11

Audio-Visual Method

Question 12

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.

Answer 12

phrase book

Question 13

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.

Answer 13

survival

Question 14

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).

Answer 14

Oral Method, structurally controlled

Question 15

English in Situations by Robert O’Neill (1970) further consolidated the basic model, in which the situation is simply a context for presenting the _____.

Answer 15

grammar

Question 16

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.

Answer 16

induction, dialogue, form

Question 17

The pattern may then be displayed in the form of a _____, and is
consolidated through successive stages of _____, beginning
with _____.

Answer 17

substitution table, controlled practice, imitation drills

Question 18

Class must have chance to gain insight into when to use _____.
_____ represent typical instances.

Answer 18

pattern, Situations

Question 19

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.

Answer 19

formal rule, Formal rules

Question 20

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.

Answer 20

generative situation, translation, explanation

Question 21

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.

Answer 21

presentation-practice-production, skill

Question 22

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.

Answer 22

agency

Question 23

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.

Answer 23

situational approach, Audiolingual Method

Question 24

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.

Answer 24

learning, pretext, principle

Question 25

his is particularly relevant now that
digital technologies have effectively dissolved the borders between the
_____ and ‘_____’ situations.

Answer 25

classroom, real life

Question 26

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.

Answer 26

context of situation

Question 27

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 _____.

Answer 27

corpus linguistics, register, style

Question 28

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 ‘_____’.

Answer 28

specific, specific purposes