How to teach English and how to achieve a good learning effect in primary school have aroused wide concern from many front-line English teachers and theoretical educators。 The traditional English education has a lot of deficiencies in the combination of basic knowledge and communicative abilities, so situational teaching appears at the right moment, which can combine the basic knowledge and communicative abilities dynamically。 This situational teaching which will have a bright future fulfills the needs of educational reform and English educators。

1。2 Definition of situation 

In the field of education, the word “situation” was first put forward by an American philosopher Dewey。 He proposed that “thought is originated from situations which are related to direct experience。” (Dewey, 1991, p132) He was the first researcher who applied situational teaching method to education, and pointed out that situation is the first factor in teaching method and thinking。

The explanation of situation in Cihai is “the social environment in the process of social activity, and the specific condition in which social behaviors occur。” (Xia Zhengnong, 2000, p1193) The explanation of situation in Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English is “all the circumstances and things that are happening at a particular time and in a particular place。” (Hornby, 2000, p1877)来,自,优.尔:论;文*网www.chuibin.com +QQ752018766-

After that, the concept of situational teaching was put forward for the first time by Brown, Collin & Duguid in the essay Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning in 1989。 They believe that “knowledge is meaningful only when it is applied to practice in a situation。 It cannot be isolated from its situation and the best way to learn knowledge is to learn it in the situation。” (Brown, Collin & Duguid, 1989, p32~42) They explained the definition of situational teaching from the perspective of cognition and pointed out the importance of situation for learning knowledge。

Nowadays, the developing of situational teaching in our country is the ascendant。 A lot of experts and teachers are doing theoretical and practical researches on situational teaching。 One of the most typical representative is a primary school Chinese expert Li Jilin who conducts the situational teaching experiment in our country for the first time。 In her view, “it is a teaching model which creates typical scenes by the combined methods of direct perception and language description, so as to stimulate the learning emotion of students, thus promoting their active participation in the teaching process。” (Li Jilin & Tian Benna, 2000, p125)