An Zhu
Jing Wang2*- 1Yunnan Vocational of Transportation, Kunming, China
- 2Southwest University, Chongqing, China
- 3The College of Arts and Sciences Kunming, Kunming, China
Despite the growing recognition of the need for specialized training in emergency language skills, educational frameworks in which disaster scenarios are integrated into language pedagogy remain underdeveloped. Therefore, this quasi-experimental study is designed to investigate the efficacy of situational teaching methods in enhancing learners’ emergency language competencies. A quasi-experimental test is used to assess the participants’ ability to process and communicate information related to critical disasters in a multilingual environment by measuring their pre-test and post-test learning outcomes. The results indicate a statistically significant improvement in the application of emergency language skills, emergency professional knowledge, and the ability to communicate emergency language following the scenario-based training. These findings highlight that the use of context-driven teaching methods, compared to traditional teaching methods, helps to compensate for the deficiencies existing in the current educational framework and effectively enhances learners’ emergency language proficiency.
Introduction
The significance of clear, timely and accurate information in saving lives and reducing suffering during disasters has been confirmed in the disaster research literature (Quintanilla and Goodfriend, 2012), as well as its effectiveness in responding to disasters (O’Brien et al., 2018). Disaster translation plays a unique role in disseminating disaster information and communicating warnings in post disaster crises (O’Brien, 2019). Internationally, academic research on the governance and planning of disaster language primarily focuses on four aspects: language ontology planning (Winger, 2017), translation planning (Tesseur, 2019), language technology planning (Nallasamy et al., 2008) and discourse planning (Squiers et al., 2019), aiming to ensure the smooth provision of emergency services during crisis situations. However, with the increasing diversity of cultures and language globally, which has raised the demand for information to be provided in multiple languages, meaning that emergency language needs to be a key element of disaster translation. Meanwhile, disaster education is also deemed to play a positive role in reducing disasters and managing disaster risks (Shaw, 2011). Therefore, the training of emergency language service talents has received unprecedented attention since the outbreak of COVID-19 (Li, 2020; Shen, 2020; Zheng, 2020). However, the cultivation of emergency language talents remains merely at the theoretical stage, the lack of systematic empirical research has become a shortcoming in the development of emergency language talent training.
When an emergency arises, emergency language service talents are able to implement various emergency measures and provide comprehensive language services, which suggests that there is an urgent need to construct a complete and effective national emergency training system for language service talent. According to the Plan for the Development of the National Language (2016–2020), a recruitment and reserve mechanism for emergency language talents needs to be established in order to enhance language emergency response and assistance capabilities (Ministry of Education, 2016). It can be seen that enhancing comprehensive language skills, enriching emergency capacity reserves, and solving the serious shortage of national emergency services all rely on cultivating emergency language talents. Cai (2020) proposes that, in order to cultivate students’ ability to prepare for disasters and respond to them, emergency language teaching in relevant fields should be included in daily language teaching, and emergency language should be included in the university curriculum in order to enhance the country’s emergency language ability by continuously cultivating qualified emergency language service talents. However, in China, the development of emergency linguistics majors in universities is still in its infancy (Sun and Zheng, 2022), there is insufficient theoretical research on emergency language response capabilities and it cannot be fully adapted to the needs of national development and emergency response. Therefore, how to cultivate emergency language talents in new situations to enhance the country’s language ability to respond to emergencies has become a topic that is worth considering (Fang, 2018). Research on the construction and cultivation of the abilities of emergency language talents has also received much attention (Li and Pan, 2021; Teng, 2021; Wang, 2020), it has also become an urgent issue to be addressed in this study.
Learners can achieve better results by immersing themselves in an educational environment that meets their needs (Winkler, 2012). In particular, the use of classroom as a platform for teaching design to enhance teaching effectiveness is widely applied in the field of education (Imperial, 2025). Situational teaching has a positive effect on language curriculum learning outcomes (Hauptman, 1971; Perin, 2011; Settlage, 2011). As the use of emergency language has the suddenness of time and a complex environment, students have relatively limited opportunities to complete emergency language courses in real environments. Hence, in order to better enhance the emergency language proficiency of college students, this study innovatively adopts an empirical research approach and simulates emergency language scenarios for teaching and training. Within the scope of situational teaching methods, an emergency language course is designed. However, traditional teaching methods that focus on task-based language teaching and examination-oriented approaches are still prevalent in China (Deng, 2018). Base on this, this study adopts a quasi-experimental design method and constructs an emergency language course based on disaster scenarios. It compares situational teaching with traditional emergency language courses to tests the effectiveness of the developed situational emergency language courses in enhancing the emergency language proficiency of Chinese college students.
Based on the above research content, the following three research questions are proposed:
1. What are the indicators of emergency language courses and talents’ abilities under situational teaching?
2. Can the use of a situational teaching method improve the emergency language ability of Chinese university students?
3. Is there a difference between the emergency language ability of college students who participate in the situational teaching method emergency language course and the traditional teaching method emergency language course?
Theoretical framework
Situational teaching
Brown et al. (1989) were the first to define situational teaching by suggesting that students should participate in activities across different disciplines in order to solve the problem of transforming knowledge into reality. Lave and Wenger (1991) elaborated on the theory of situational teaching, stating that the learning environment provides a framework for the learning activities that can guide and support learners. Contu and Willmott (2003) also proposed that learning in social and physical environments is more effective than non-situational learning. Given the suddenness of time and complexity of the environment involved in emergency language courses, teachers need to conduct teaching and training in a controllable environment and pre-set conditions while simulating emergency situations to partially compensate for objective limitations (Li and Pan, 2021). In situational teaching, students are more likely to be given a direct experience, which can help them to connect their emergency language knowledge with its application (Dewi and Primayana, 2019). Therefore, the application of the situational teaching method in emergency language courses requires teachers to combine the teaching content with experiential learning activities (Ajani, 2023).
Emergency language proficiency
The capability of the language service in emergency situations is one of the most important indicators of a country’s language ability (Teng, 2018). Emergency language proficiency is primarily the ability to utilize language resources to provide language emergency assistance during sudden public events (Wang, 2020), including the provision of post disaster language assistance using language translation and communication (Cox et al., 2019), which is the training objective of emergency language course (Teng, 2021). The competence not only refers to knowledge and skills, but also the total ability to mobilize knowledge and social resources in specific contexts to facilitate the completion of complex tasks (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2016). It can be seen that, in the field of language teaching, language ability also includes potential language knowledge (Zheng, 2020) and the capability to communicate language using this knowledge (Savignon, 2018; Taylor, 1988). Hence, in the specific field of emergency language teaching, this study proposes that the indicator of emergency language talents’ ability is proposed to be the language proficiency required to cope with emergencies, as well as the emergency language knowledge and communication skills in this study, including having professional emergency knowledge and the ability to apply and communicate it.
Materials and methods
Methods
The aim of this study was to design an emergency language course using a situational teaching method and to develop initial drafts of four situational units. Experts were invited to review the validity of the course construction content to ultimately determine the emergency language course and indicators of emergency language talents using the situational teaching method, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Research framework for emergency language courses in context.
On this basis, a quasi-experiment was conducted for 10 weeks from December, 2024 to March, 2025. The participants in this emergency language course experiment were Chinese college students, divided into an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group received situational teaching, while the control group received traditional English teaching. Emergency language test questions were used as tools to test both the experimental group and control group before and after the experiment, and data was collected to determine if there were any changes in the two groups’ emergency language proficiency after the intervention, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. A quasi-experimental design.
Participants
Based on the research ethics, the participants for this study were recruited from a private university in Kunming, China, by distributing informed consent forms to the students there. Based on the principle of voluntary participation, 105 college students from two existing classes were selected to participate in this quasi-experimental study. The first class consisted of 55 students as the experimental group and the second class contained 50 students as the control group. The experimental objectives and process were communicated to the participants before the experiment.
Based on the research purpose, the first step was to verify whether the control group and the experimental group of the research sample were homogenous (Creswell, 2012). In this study, the scores of the College English Test Band 4 (CET-4) were compared to ensure that the two groups had a similar initial level of language proficiency (Chen and Webb, 2017). The demographic variable information of the experimental and control groups of the participants in this study is presented in Table 3, from which it could be seen that there was a total of 55 students in the experimental group. 16 of them were male students, accounting for 29.091% of the total, and 39 were female, accounting for 70.909% of the total. 36 students had passed CET-4, accounting for 65.455% of the total in the whole class. There were 12 male students in the control group, accounting for 24% of the total, and 38 female students, accounting for 76% of the total. Thirty three of the control group had passed CET-4, accounting for 66% of the total number in the class. Hence, from the perspective of gender, the ratio of male and female students in the control and experimental groups was similar, and the English proficiency of the two groups of students was very similar.
Table 1. Emergency language talent capability indication system.
Table 2. Analysis of test difficulty.
Table 3. Demographic variable information table.
Intervention
The intervention was implemented over a period of 10 weeks. The EG was taught according to the situational teaching method of presenting situations, entering certain scenarios, group collaboration and presenting results. The CG mainly trained in the teaching method of listening, speaking, reading, and writing, in accordance with the 3P traditional teaching method of presentation, practice and production. This study divided the emergency situations into four situational teaching units: sudden natural disasters, sudden accident disasters, sudden public health incidents and sudden social security incidents. Based on the theory of situational teaching method, an emergency language course is established. At the core of the situational teaching method is that teachers design scenarios and enable students to experience and simulate situations. Therefore, in this course, teaching methods were divided into simulated learning and experiential learning, with teaching activities primarily focusing on role-playing and group discussions. The pre-test and post-test design represents the most common experimental research design, which is arranged before and after teaching, when constructing situational teaching methods courses. The establishment of emergency language courses using situational teaching methods is shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3. Construction of emergency language course using situational teaching method.
Instrument
The teaching of experimental research has always been valued by second language acquisition researchers, especially in recent years, when the emphasis has been placed on evaluating the quality of the research (Plonsky, 2013). Multiple choice questions with multiple options are becoming increasingly common in educational research to evaluate students’ performance (D’Sa and Visbal-Dionaldo, 2017). The effectiveness of experimental interventions can be demonstrated by conducting the same test twice and calculating the correlation between each score (Fulcher and Davidson, 2007). The emergency capability of the students in this research experiment was assessed using internationally-recognized test questions from the “Emergency Disaster Preparedness Exam Questions” developed by the “Language Concepts of English and Spanish” organization.
The role of language testing in society is evident in the language testing field (Shohamy, 2020), which can help to assess students’ progress (Rahman, 2020). Multiple choice questions, which belong to the objective question type, are a popular form of language testing because the answers are unique, and there is no subjective judgment bias in teachers’ grading (Lee and Winke, 2012). Multiple-choice questions with three options have a less negative impact on test results than four or five choice items, more effective distractors, and less time spent on use (Rodriguez, 2005). Therefore, the test questions in this study consist of 30 multiple-choice questions, with three options for the multiple-choice question type, and the language in which the questions are written is English.
The multiple-choice questions cover three major aspects of emergency language ability: emergency language application, emergency language knowledge, and emergency language communication. 13 of the questions are related to the emergency language application aspect, 10 questions to the emergency language knowledge aspect, and 7 questions to the emergency language communication aspect. The test questions are only used after being reviewed and approved by four experts. According to the calculation method of the overall CVI index for expert validity, the data of the four expert reviews result from foreign language teaching, English, translation studies, and emergency language training teachers. The CVI index for each dimension reached.833, thereby indicating good expert validity.
In order for the test to be effective, the questions must be well constructed to reflect the evaluation effect. Teachers can reduce question defects and improve the quality of the questions by following the principles of project analysis (Tarrant and Ware, 2012). Therefore, 150 non-experimental objects were recruited for the emergency language test questions in this study as an evaluation tool for the pre-test. The SPSS item analysis method was used to analyze the Difficulty Index (DIF I) and Discrimination Index (DI) of this set of questions (D’Sa and Visbal-Dionaldo, 2017). Sayyah et al. (2012) suggest that an average item difficulty of between 30 and 70% for the test questions can be considered as a relatively high overall difficulty level. After the calculation, the average DIF I in this study was 64%, i.e., between 30 and 70%. Therefore, the difficulty of this test is within an acceptable range. The main body of the test paper should consist of questions of medium and low difficulty. It is generally considered to be appropriate for questions of medium and low difficulty to account for about 80% of all the question items (D’Sa and Visbal-Dionaldo, 2017).
The DI value of the project distinguishes the students’ abilities, ranging from 0 to 1. The higher the DI value, the better the students with higher and lower abilities can be distinguished. Gajjar et al. (2014) propose that items with a DI greater than 0.35 are considered as “excellent,” items with a DI between 0.25 and 0.34 are considered as “good,” items with a DI between 0.15 and 0.24 are deemed to be “passing,” and items with a DI less than 0.15 are considered as “poor,” negative DI (<0) indicates that low achievers answer more accurately than high achievers, which may be due to a defective project. A factor analysis was used in this study to divide the high scoring 27% into high groups and the low scoring 73% into low groups. The average score of the high group was calculated to be 42.667, while the low group score was 26.883. According to the DI calculation formula suggested by Gajjar et al. (2014), discriminability = (high score group mean − low score group mean) ÷ by the total score. The discriminability of this test is 28.261%, proving that the test has good discriminability. The DIF I and DI of the test questions in this study meet the data requirements, the DI value and the results of analyzing the difficulty level of each of a total of 30 questions are shown in Table 2.
Data statistical analysis
The most common experimental research design consists of conducting a pre-test and post-test during the experimental process (Cook and Wong, 2008). Therefore, this teaching experiment will last for 10 weeks, with a pre-test conducted 1 week before the experimental intervention and a post-test conducted 1 week after it. To assess the two groups of studentse emergency language proficiency, they will both be measured by the same professional surveyors in the same measurement environment. The pre-test and post-test will also contain emergency language test questions as measurement tools to collect the data, followed by an independent sample t-test, paired sample t-test, and ANCOVA for a statistical analysis. Firstly, independent sample t-test was used to conduct homogeneity testing between EG and CG. There was no statistically significant difference in emergency language ability between the two groups of students in the pre-test, indicating that the two groups were homogeneous and met the prerequisites for the teaching experiment. Next, paired sample t-test was conducted on the pre-test and post-test scores of the two groups. If the p-value is above 0.05, it indicates a significant difference between the two groups after the experimental intervention, suggesting that the students’ emergency language proficiency has been significantly improved due to the teaching experiment. Finally, ANOVA was employed to compare whether the emergency language proficiency of EG and CG had achieved the experimental effect. Specifically, with group as the fixed variable, post-test scores of emergency language test questions as the dependent variable, and pre-test scores as the covariate, it was verified whether the emergency language proficiency of the two groups of students had significantly improved after the experimental intervention.
Results
The talent ability indicators for emergency language courses
Based on literature, talent ability indicators for emergency language courses are created in this study based on previous research, as shown in Table 1.
The situational teaching method can enhance the emergency language proficiency of Chinese university students
Before conducting a teaching experiment, it is necessary to verify the experimental group and control group of the emergency language course, and determine whether the experimental and control groups of the research sample are homogeneous (Creswell, 2012). An independent sample t-test was used for this purpose in this study, and a p> 05 would indicate that there was homogeneity between the two groups of students; hence, the teaching experiment could be implemented (Kim, 2019). The results obtained from the independent sample t-test showed that the average value of the control group was 36.749 and of the experimental group, it was 35.842, which were relatively close. The F-value was 0.006 and the p-value was 0.937 (> 0.05). This indicated that there was no statistically significant difference between the two groups’ emergency language proficiency during the pre-test, which, in turn, indicated that there was homogeneity, which met the prerequisite conditions for the teaching experiments. The specific independent sample t-test results can be seen in Table 4.
Table 4. Independent sample t-test for the pre-test of emergency language test questions.
Fulcher and Davidson (2007) propose that the correlation between scores can be calculated by conducting the same test twice in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of experimental interventions. Therefore, after conducting the pre-test and post-test on the experimental group and control group in this study, a paired sample t-test analysis was performed on the post-test and pre-test scores of the two groups. A p-value greater than 0.05 would indicate that there was no significant difference between the two groups after the experimental intervention (Kim, 2019), and that the teaching experiment had not significantly improved the students’ emergency language proficiency. A p-value less than 0.05 would indicate a significant difference between the two groups after the experimental intervention, and that the students’ emergency language proficiency had significantly improved due to the teaching experiment, as shown in Table 5.
Table 5. Analysis of t-test for paired samples of emergency language test questions.
After the paired sample t-test of the pre-test and post-test data, it can be seen that the p-values of the paired sample t-test of the pre-test and post-test scores of the three dimensions in both the experimental group and the control group were all less than 0.05 (Ross and Willson, 2017). Therefore, it showed that significant differences were observed in emergency language application, emergency professional knowledge, and emergency language communication ability covered by the emergency language proficiency test between the two groups before and after the experimental intervention. By comparing the scores of the three dimensions of emergency language proficiency between the two groups of t-tests, it was found that the post-test average scores of both CG and EG were significantly higher than pre-test average scores (Ross and Willson, 2017).
In quantitative research, mean difference can be used to test whether an intervention is effective, and it serves as the basis for calculating effect size, making the results more comparable and interpretable (Appelbaum et al., 2018). The mean difference between the pre-test and post-test dimensions of emergency language application in the EG is M = 4.221 (SD = 1.637), and the effect size is significant (p < 0.001), belonging to the maximum effect (d = 2.581); The mean difference of this dimension in the CG is M = 2.777 (SD = 1.801), and the effect size is significant (p < 0.001), belonging to the large effect (d = 1.540). It can be seen that the EG has significantly higher improvement in the dimension of emergency language application than the CG.
The mean difference between the pre-test and post-test of emergency professional knowledge in the EG is M = 3.247 (SD = 1.400), and the effect size is significant (p < 0.001), belonging to the maximum effect (d = 2.317); The mean difference of this dimension in the CG is M = 2.136 (SD = 1.540), and the effect size is significant (p < 0.001), belonging to the large effect (d = 1.392). It can be seen that the EG has significantly higher improvement in emergency professional knowledge dimension than the CG.
The mean difference between the pre-test and post-test of emergency language communication in the EG is M = 2.273 (SD = 1.101), and the effect size is significant (p < 0.001), belonging to the maximal effect (d = 2.064); The mean difference of this dimension in the CG is M = 1.495 (SD = 1.211), and the effect size is significant (p < 0.001), belonging to the large effect (d = 1.232). It can be seen that the EG has significantly higher improvement in emergency knowledge and skills dimension than the CG.
In summary, it indicates that after the experiment, the post-test scores of the three dimensions in the EG were significantly improved compared to those in the CG. It shows the emergency language proficiency of the EG has improved compared to the CG.
There are differences in emergency language proficiency between college students in the experimental group and those in the control group
A score is measured within the same group before conducting the experiment. For example, different groups, teaching methods or stimulation are used to measure the score after the experimental intervention in order to determine its effectiveness (Bas-Sarmiento et al., 2017). This study used the group as a fixed variable, the post-test scores of the emergency language test questions as the dependent variable, and the pre-test scores as covariates to verify whether the emergency language proficiency of the two groups had significantly improved after the experimental intervention. Firstly, a homogeneity test was conducted on the scores of the two groups of test questions. The results showed that the sum of squares of the interaction between the experimental group and the control group and the pre-test was 1.061, with a degree of freedom of 1, an F-value of 0.042, and a p-value of 0.837 (> 0.05). These results were insignificant, indicating that the pre-test of students’ emergency language ability in the two classes was homogeneous and met the prerequisite conditions for an ANCOVA analysis. Hence, a linear covariate analysis could be conducted, the details of which can be seen in Table 6.
Table 6. Homogeneity test of emergency language ANCOVA.
The post-test ANCOVA descriptive statistics of students’ emergency language ability showed a control group sample size of 50 people, with an average of 43.429 and a standard deviation of 4.528. The sample size of the experimental group was 55 people, with an average of 45.111 and a standard deviation of 3.994. The total sample size of the two groups was 105 people, with an average of 44.31 and a standard deviation of 4.248. The ANCOVA descriptive statistics after the emergency language proficiency test are shown in Table 7.
Table 7. ANCOVA descriptive statistics for post-test of emergency language ability.
According to the ANCOVA test, the sum of squares of the pre-test scores of the experimental group and the control group was 85.566, with a degree of freedom of 1, an F-value of 3.446, and a p-value of 0.066 (> 0.05). This data was not significantly different, indicating that the pre-test scores of the two groups had no significant impact on the post-test scores. The sum of squares of the group was 225.819, the degree of freedom was 1, the F-value was 9.094, and the p-value was 0.003 (< 0.05), all of which was significant, indicating a significant difference in the post-test scores between the experimental group and the control group, influenced by different group methods. The specific data is shown in Table 8.
Table 8. Emergency language ANCOVA test.
As shown in Table 9, the adjusted average scores of the experimental group after the emergency language test were 43.249 and of the control group, they were 40.292. However, the ANCOVA test results in Table 8 showed that the post-test scores between the two groups were significantly different. It was found when comparing the average values that the experimental group had a higher value than the control group. This result indicates that the use of situational teaching had a more significant effect on improving the emergency language ability of the experimental group than the use of traditional teaching methods on the control group.
Table 9. Comparison of post-test adjusted average values for emergency language.
Discussion
Four situational teaching units were designed based on the theory of situational teaching in response to the first research question (Lave and Wenger, 1991), and the talent ability indicators for the emergency language course were constructed based on previous research results. The establishment of emergency language courses has become a necessity in recent years. The creative use of situational teaching methods to construct emergency language courses not only conforms to the characteristics of suddenness and unpredictability of emergency language, but also cultivates students’ ability to solve problems in close proximity to real situations (Bowen, 2017). The ability indicators of emergency language service talents are the primary focus of constructing emergency language courses. The research literature on language ability indicators is integrated in this study and three major modules and 10 secondary system connotations in emergency language courses are constructed to provide educators and learners with the ability to measure the basic qualities and abilities required by the participants in emergency language services.
In response to the second research question, emergency language test questions were used as the research tools. Data from the pre-test and post-test of the teaching experiments were collected and a data analysis was used to determine if a situational teaching method is applicable to emergency language courses and if it can improve the emergency language ability of Chinese college students, including the results of their emergency language application ability, emergency language knowledge ability, and emergency language communication ability. Hence, the second research question of the study has been empirically verified, which is that the situational teaching method has a significant effect on emergency language courses and is an effective strategy for use in these courses. In other words, adopting the situational teaching method for emergency language course teaching can improve Chinese college students’ emergency language ability. In an emergency language classroom, where the situational teaching method is used, students must infer and acquire knowledge based on situational information, while demonstrating how their acquired knowledge can be used to deal with real-life problems by assuming a certain emergency situation and thinking about such problems (Chiou, 2020). Experience, perception, practice, cooperation, participation and communication are all beneficial for language learning and the acquisition of language knowledge.
It was found from the third research result that using a situational teaching method to teach an emergency language course significantly improved Chinese college students’ emergency language ability, and the teaching effectiveness of emergency language courses using situational teaching is substantially better than that of traditional teaching of emergency language courses. Most language teachers have become accustomed to traditional teaching models and experiences. They tend to always follow the traditional teaching process based on fixed teaching procedures, teaching according to the steps of presentation, practice and production of the 3P traditional teaching method. However, traditional language teaching classrooms cannot provide students with a good language environment, and they find it difficult to see the results of learning the language. After a period of time, they gradually lose interest in language learning (Liang et al., 2021), which has a negative impact on improving their skills. The situational teaching method uses various teaching resources to create and restore authentic language scenes that are consistent with the teaching content, making it easy for students to integrate into the scene and have direct experience of it (Dickinson et al., 2019). This language teaching method can stimulate students’ interest in learning the language, deepen their cognition and understanding of the language knowledge, improve their comprehensive language use ability, ultimately achieve the goal of language teaching, improve the quality of language courses, have a positive impact on language course learning outcomes, and improve overall learning achievements (Perin, 2011; Settlage, 2011).
The development and design of emergency language courses is still in its infancy in Chinese colleges, and teaching methods require continuous thinking, practice and innovation (Li, 2020). This study creatively designs an emergency language curriculum and formulates corresponding ability indicators for the curriculum, which can provide a reference for future emergency language education in talent cultivation in universities and contribute to the reserve of national emergency language talents. Additionally, emergency language education has been mostly focused on theoretical research, with relatively few empirical studies (Li, 2024). This study adopts a quasi-experimental design method and collects first-hand data, further indicating the direction for future research on improving college students’ emergency language abilities.
Conclusion
The learning of emergency language courses is regarded as a situational practice in this study. In each thematic unit, the teachers create an emergency situation combined with the students’ life experience, guiding students to learn the language and acquire language knowledge based on experience, perception, practice, cooperation, participation and communication. Students then complete situational tasks using situational learning strategies, such as group collaboration and cooperative discussions, enabling them to master emergency language application and related professional knowledge, cultivating emergency qualities and ethics in cross-cultural communication. This study contains a situational framework for developing students’ language abilities, which can serve as a teaching design model that consists of a combination of language abilities and situational teaching, providing a valuable reference for future language course design theories.
Establishing a higher education curriculum includes testing the effectiveness of the curriculum. Furthermore, disaster education is important and urgent; hence, it is significant to cultivate emergency language talents by enhancing college students’ emergency language abilities to strengthen the national emergency response capabilities. Therefore, a 10-week teaching experiment was conducted in this study using a quasi-experimental design method based on the content of the established curriculum. The control group and the experimental group were taught emergency language courses using traditional teaching methods and situational teaching methods, respectively, in order to verify the effectiveness of college students’ emergency language ability improvement based on situational teaching. Emergency language proficiency test questions were used as evaluation tools to obtain the pre-test and post-test data. According to the results of the data analysis, the emergency language proficiency levels of both the control group and the experimental group of students had improved after 10 weeks of the teaching intervention, but the teaching effectiveness of the experimental group using the situational teaching method was better than that of the control group using the traditional teaching method. This illustrates that the application of the situational teaching method in emerging emergency language courses facilitates the exploration and practice of teaching methods, providing a teaching paradigm for courses that emphasizes both theory and practice in such courses.
Limitations
Like all studies, this one has some limitations. The small sample size may affect the external validity and universality of the results. Additionally, the experiment only consisted of a 10-week course; therefore, the next step is to consider extending the experimental duration as much as possible. Finally, the study did not include a follow-up to assess students’ retention of emergency language skills, making it difficult to determine if the participants could effectively apply these skills in the real world.
Data availability statement
The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author/s.
Ethics statement
The studies involving humans were approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee, Dhurakij Pundit University, Thailand. The studies were conducted in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.
Author contributions
AZ: Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. JW: Investigation, Methodology, Writing – review & editing. YL: Investigation, Software, Validation, Writing – review & editing.
Funding
The author(s) declared that financial support was not received for this work and/or its publication.
Conflict of interest
The author(s) declared that this work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Generative AI statement
The author(s) declared that generative AI was not used in the creation of this manuscript.
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Keywords: competence, emergency language, quasi-experiment, situational teaching, test
Citation: Zhu A, Wang J and Li Y (2026) Testing emergency language skills in situational teaching: a quasi-experimental research. Front. Educ. 10:1713420. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1713420
Received: 26 September 2025; Revised: 10 December 2025; Accepted: 16 December 2025;
Published: 22 January 2026.
Edited by:
Anantharaman Venkataraman, Singapore General Hospital, SingaporeReviewed by:
Erikson Saragih, Universitas Sumatera Utara, IndonesiaTomas J. R. Diquito, University of Mindanao, Philippines
Copyright © 2026 Zhu, Wang and Li. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Jing Wang, OTMwNjgyMThAcXEuY29t