Language Laboratories

In most developing countries, the use of language laboratories is seen as a recent development in language teaching. It adopts tape recorder techniques to meet the language teacher’s special requirements. It represents an advancement in the application of tape recording techniques to language learning.

Master recordings can offer, apart from graded exercises, a wide variety of language recordings made by native speakers. Such recordings can offer practice drills in pronunciation, intonation, language rhythm, fluency and comprehension. The special value of the language laboratory is that large groups of learners are permitted, by the structural arrangement of booths linked to a central control, to share the teaching skills of one language teacher in a manner most economical of time and effort.

In addition, the laboratory method is far less wasteful than the classroom choral approach. Each learner is able to enjoy most of the benefit of individual teaching. Also, all learners are able to work all the time. Furthermore, the teacher is relieved of necessity to supervise irksome repetitive drills, and is released for the real teaching purpose of diagnosis and correction.

There is a need to emphasize that the laboratory will not teach by itself. It must be employed for a specific purpose, and its capabilities adapted to that purpose by a skilled teacher. It requires a high degree of competence and concentration on the part of the teachers.

Culled from

Production and Utilization of Education Media

by Ayo Ajelabi