Strategies for applying situational teaching to transfer-and-create activities in high school English reading classrooms

Abstract

The General Senior High School English Curriculum Standard introduced the English Learning Activities View, which organizes classroom work into three interrelated and progressively demanding levels: learning-understanding, applying-practicing, and transferring-creating. The last level is the highest: it is where a student's ability is converted into subject competence, because it requires moving beyond the text, solving problems in unfamiliar contexts, expressing oneself creatively, and internalizing the values embedded in the discourse. In reading instruction, however, this level proves to be the weakest link in practice: the situations teachers create drift away from the theme, the products of activity become formulaic, and transfer to real use fails to occur. This article argues that situational teaching – a tradition Chinese in origin (Li Jilin) and grounded in the international theories of situated cognition and situated learning – serves as the natural methodological vehicle for this level, since both rest on a shared premise: knowledge is situated, and transfer requires genuine recontextualization. Drawing on the analysis of policy documents and scholarly literature, the article formulates a set of design strategies: creating authentic, theme-linked problem situations; ensuring continuity of the text's language; embedding high-cognitive-level questions; orienting activity toward a communicative product with assessment built in; and using multimodal, emotionally engaging means of situation creation. The conclusion is that the weakness of the transfer-create level is, above all, a weakness of situation design – precisely what situational teaching is equipped to remedy.