In which contexts would you use Situational Language Teaching?

Situation Language Teaching is a way of teaching where students are engaged in drills of the target language structures that are presented in situations. Students repeat some selected dialogues or sentence structures while describing pictures through repeated drills. Through practising drills, learners form a habit of using the learned language in a context. 

The context of following SLT depends on the needs of learners. The contexts can be similar to the contexts of audio-lingualism, because both the methods are very similar in their goals and techniques. If learners want to communicate with a group of people for business, teachers design their classes with sentence structures and selected vocabulary. For example, a group of businessmen who export shrimps wants to learn English. Based on their educational backgrounds, teachers can design their classes with some chunks of speech and related vocabulary. Learners will drill the selected dialogues to form a habit of using the learned dialogues while they will be meeting people from foreign countries. In this context, the Situational Language Teaching method may work well. 

Another context of SLT can be a classroom where learners want to know some particular cultural practices of a group of people. In this situation, teachers will design their classes with reading texts with images. They can present specific vocabulary and sentence structures to the students. Learners will describe the images using the n vocabulary and structures. The drills are very important here that are presented based on situations. This will help them practice the structures that they could be successful in communicating with people from different cultures. 

For Bangladeshi mainstream classrooms, similar to Audio Jingualism, SLT be partly used when teachers can use some conversation dialogues on doing groceries, meeting doctors, and asking for information. For example, students need tou know how they will communicate with a doctor if they are sick while travelling and studying in an English speaking country. Drills on doctor-patient conversation with some selected vocabulary and phrases will make the students competent in seeing a doctor. By practising many times, learners can form a habit using the target language in context. 

Though SLT is an old method, it is still used in some contexts. It can be used more effectively when a group of people meet people from different languages for a short period of time. If people meet to serve a particular purpose within a short period of time, SLT can be effective. However, this depends on what the learners expect in the classroom. If learners want to go abroad for higher studies, SLT may not be a useful method to learn the target language. As the learners will need more academic tasks to be able to read and write in the target language, they will need a combination of SLT and other methods.