The Oral Approach or Situational Language Teaching is an approach developed by British applied linguist in the 1930s to the 1960s. While it is unknown for many teachers, it had a big influence on language courses till the 1980s. Textbooks such as Streamline English (Hartley and Viney 1979) was designed following the SLT approach principles.
The Oral Approach or Situational Language Teaching is based on a structural view of language. Speech, structure and a focus on a set of basic vocabulary are seen as the basis of language teaching. This was a view similar to American structuralists, such as Fries. However, what distinguishes The Situational Language Teaching approach is its emphasis on the presentation of structures in situations.