Situational Syllabus

A syllabus organised around recurrent real-world situations — at the bank, at the doctor, ordering a meal, asking directions — with language items selected for their utility within each setting. The unit of design is the social context, not the grammatical form or the communicative function.

Origin

A. S. Hornby coined the phrase the Situational Approach in 1950 in two articles in ELT Journal (then English Language Teaching), describing how a teacher can convey meaning through staged classroom situations rather than translation. Hornby drew on Harold Palmer's earlier work at the Institute for Research in English Teaching in Tokyo and on the British Reform Movement tradition. The approach materialised in Oxford Progressive English for Adult Learners (1954–56) and was elaborated in The Teaching of Structural Words and Sentence Patterns (1959–66). Through the 1950s and 1960s it became the mainstay of UK-based EFL, blending situational presentation with a structural underlying sequence.

Design Features

Each unit centres on a setting with predictable participants, goals, and language. The teacher establishes the situation through visual aids, dialogue, or staged action; target structures emerge from that context and are then practised in controlled exchanges before learners transfer them to fresh situations. Sequencing typically moves from concrete and immediate settings (the classroom, the home) toward more remote or transactional ones (the workplace, the bank).

The situational frame makes vocabulary and grammar choices feel motivated rather than arbitrary, but the syllabus assumes that situations recur with stable language — an assumption D.A. Wilkins (1976) challenged on the grounds that the same function (requesting, complaining, agreeing) cuts across many situations and the same situation hosts many functions.

Revival and Later Treatments

Yalden (1987) and Nunan (1988) revisited situational organisation as one strand within larger course-design frameworks. Yalden's Principles of Course Design for Language Teaching placed situations alongside topics, themes, and general notions inside a proportional Multi-Syllabus. Nunan's Syllabus Design treated situational specification as a product-oriented option useful for short, needs-driven courses but limited as a sole organising principle. Modern coursebooks rarely use a pure situational syllabus; they embed situations as contextual frames over a grammatical or functional spine.

Examples in Coursebooks

The classic situational corpus includes Hornby's Oxford Progressive English for Adult Learners (1954–56), L. G. Alexander's Situational English and First Things First (1967), and the BBC's English by Television series. ESP and survival-English programmes still favour situational organisation: airline-crew English, hotel English, and pre-arrival courses for migrants typically sequence units by setting, since the learner's needs cluster around recognisable transactional encounters.

References

• Hornby, A. S. (1950). The Situational Approach in Language Teaching (I, II, III). English Language Teaching IV(4–6).
• Hornby, A. S. (1954–56). Oxford Progressive English for Adult Learners. Oxford University Press.
• Wilkins, D. A. (1976). Notional Syllabuses. Oxford University Press.
• Yalden, J. (1987). Principles of Course Design for Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press.
• Nunan, D. (1988). Syllabus Design. Oxford University Press.