In the early 1980s, some professors have been implementing situation teaching started with Chinese then other subjects have been related. This influences the situation of learning Mandarin in China in a certain degree. They treat Chinese teaching from the visual angle of children and have raised the opinion of transforming Chinese situation teaching to situation education. The basic patterns of situation education, according to them, are to broaden education space, shorten the mental distance, and strengthen applied operation by making use of role effect in order to provide a broad growing environment which is close to real life. This will promote their characteristics to develop comprehensively.
They also think that the operation pattern of situation teaching should take “aesthetics” as breakthrough, “affection” as bond, “thinking” as core and “practicing” as means according to the surrounding environment. This teaching reformation brings new blood for traditional Chinese Lessons. But some people doubt about this view. They think that this kind of situation education refers to teaching in the “situation” that teacher “sets”. It only differs from the “artificiality” of the usual teaching situation, which is a living space permeated by the intention of educators and is the so-called “optimized environment”.
In other words, situation teaching is a presupposed environment of teachers for a certain value which will be taught to students by utilizing emotion skills in the implementing process. Some people think that this teaching method is good for Chinese Lessons. If you are learning Mandarin in China, you may benefit from this.
The difference between situation teaching and circumstance teaching lies that situation teaching emphasizes on teaching language in natural situation, but circumstance teaching emphasizes on having Chinese Lessons in the situation set and optimized by teachers, which is almost the epistemological foundation of circumstance.
But one scholar rethinks of the difference between situation teaching and circumstance teaching. He thinks that all kinds of situation or circumstance can be both artificial and natural. This definition is obviously against the logical principles of researching. We can’t divide situation and circumstance like this, for it is farfetched. Situation refers to the specific circumstance used or appears in some words. Situation teaching method represents that to make use of and create all kinds of situations according to teaching outline and teaching materials in order to involve students in rich, natural or half-natural speech acquisition environment so that they can learn language well. He mainly discusses the use and creation of three situations in spoken Chinese Lessons and the transformation of the three situations. Real situation includes real situation outside class and real situation inside class. Memory situation includes me-oriented memory situation and not-me-oriented memory situation. Associated situation includes future association, role association and narration association.
This is actually a proposition about situation——what is situation teaching. Professor Zhou Xiaobing pointed two language situations of outside class and inside class. Inside class situation of course is set artificially while outside class situation is objective. In fact, this is similar with the former circumstance teaching. Both inside class and outside class situations are set to meet students’ learning requirement. But more subjective things exist in Chinese Lessons and more objective things exist out of Chinese Lessons.
An another situation teaching method thinks that situation we mentioned above is not the language situation in our daily life, but the one set specially for having Chinese Lessons. It is essentially different from the context of modern speech communication and pragmatics. It refers to speech situation, in which people use language to have specific communication, including contexts, situation contexts (such as time, place, topic, occupation or relations of participants), traditional contexts of national culture (historical culture background, social regulations and values). Compared with situation, it is not the environment that people set or optimize, but the real speech environment. Obviously, the situation mentioned by situation teaching school is not context that modern linguistics refers to.
The significance of situation teaching is to emancipate Chinese teaching from the shadow of mental education and take the cultivation of speech ability as the target of Chinese teaching.