Jim Scrivener: What? Never been shown how to do a situational presentation?

In his talk Jim set out to take us (methodologically!) back in time (quite refreshing, in a context when presenters tend to impress their audience with new technology) by reminding us of what a situational presentation (sitpres) is. He conceded that it is old-fashioned, discredited and does not feature on most training courses. Has it rightfully been forgotten, though?

He defined a sitpres as a classroom technique for presenting (inputting) new language to learners, commonly represented with the first P in the PPP (presentation-practice-production) teaching cycle. It offers an initial focus on meaning (usually illustrated by pictures) – not immediately on form. The teacher elicits language and drills it. There is a lot of restricted oral use and learners are not relying on written notes (at least in the beginning), the main focus being on putting and practising the target grammar structure(s) in a situational context.

The overlapping of discrete items from one lesson to another serves to produce a rounded understanding of language as the course progresses, the continuum from teacher-controlled item presentation to learner-production suggesting behaviourist views of learning and teaching.

Establishing a good context was identified as essential for the success of sitpres activities. The context, therefore, needs to:
- be interesting (not necessarily real)
- be preferably funny (and therefore memorable for the students)
- integrate intonation into grammar
- involve real language, used by real people
- lead towards naturally-sounding language produced by the learners
- demonstrate an authentic use of language

A few embedded assumptions and beliefs emerged from Jim’s talk:

- input is valid in times of teachers focusing mostly on excessive communication practice
- form focus is valid
- it's useful to focus on meaning before form
- it's useful to focus on oral language before written language
- upfront high-teacher-activity is valid (vs. course books leading the way only)

To summarise, Jim, voiced his worry that the current generation of teachers can set up and run communicative tasks but they are much weaker at focusing on form or on clarifying meaning. He, therefore, identified the need for a potential shift of teaching focus/reshuffle of teaching priorities and possibly even the need for questioning and reformulating the goals/contents of teacher training courses.