6. Language Laboratory: Purposes and Shortcomings

· Privacy: The headset/microphone provides students with a psychological privacy that promotes their speaking ability. It reduces the inhibitions felt in normal classroom situations.

· Attention: As the language lab allows the student to listen to the program stimulus individually, each individual student's attention is focused on the program material being studied.

· Individualization: Even in labs that are not provided with digital recording capability, the equipment usually provides the capability for dividing the class into several groups. These groups can be listening to different programs on varying subject matters and at different levels of inter-activity.

· Developing Listening Skills: The language lab helps students develop good listening skills and aids the process of communication. Students hear the correct language patterns all the time through their headsets instead of mimicking other students who may be pronouncing incorrectly.

· Efficiency: The teacher can monitor individual students (and talk to them) much more efficiently than in a regular classroom. Usually in a regular classroom all other students stop speaking when the teacher communicates with an individual student. In a lab they will continue working without interruption. Also, a teacher can interact with many more students since he/she merely presses a mouse key or touches a button in order to be in contact with a student. The language lab makes most efficient use of time, improving the teacher/student time ratio and allowing the instructor to maximize the use of time in a given lesson.

· Variety: The language lab provides variety from regular classroom situations. The teacher's role is changed and the students are more active for longer periods of time. The use of visual stimulus coupled with selective audio materials increases the attention span of the students.

· Oral Testing: Oral test features allow instructors to test students with a question or stimulus and only record the student's answer. Instructors who later play the student recordings can easily mark the students work, which is made up of only the responses given by the student.

· Teacher Monitoring: Since the teacher is not concentrating on producing the next question or drill, he/she can concentrate more on the student responses. The instructor has more time to produce materials and oversee class activities due to the automatic rather than manually controlled instructor console features.

· Role Playing Exercises: Using the random pairing feature that all advanced modern learning systems incorporate, instructors can generate a variety of exercises structured around role-playing. Students can be paired or grouped together in small numbers and hold conversational practice with each other. Due to the random selection of student partners the students’ interest level is always high in anticipation of who their paired partner is likely to be.

Shortcomings:

No use of recordings for pronunciation. Students are interested in words, phrases and their meanings. They do not have the patience to listen to the correct pronunciation and practice them.

Teacher listens randomly to students around the room. Individual student correction is haphazard.

All but the most simple or first generation laboratories allow the teacher to remotely control the tape transport controls of the student booths (record, stop, rewind etc) from the master desk. This allows for easy distribution of the master programme material, which is often copied at high speed onto the student positions for later use by the students at their own pace.

The technological changes in the language lab over the years are not only the result of technological advancement but also of changes in language teaching / acquisition methods. Earlier views of language learning focused primarily on the mastery of grammatical competence. Language learning was viewed as a process of mechanical habit formation. Errors were to be avoided through controlled opportunities for production (either written or spoken). By memorizing dialogs and performing drills, the chances of making mistakes were minimized. Learning was very much seen as under the control of the teacher. In recent years, language learning has been viewed from a very different perspective. It is seen as resulting from processes such as interaction and negotiation.

Slowly began a movement away from traditional lesson formats toward the use of pair work activities, role plays, group work activities and project work. And there was a change in classroom dynamics. One result of the change in classroom dynamics resulted in focus on language laboratory with student chairs equipped with headphones and remotes. This has further changed shape with the student area taking a U-shape and the students getting headphones and handsets to participate in the language activities. The new lab has come up keeping in mind future classroom activities like role playing, group discussions and mock interviews. Further, the new language lab is equipped with video recording facilities which can act as a great mode of evaluation and feedback. By this visual evaluation of the students' performance, the instructor can pin-point the areas that need to be improved or changed. Apart from this, the students can also critically analyze their own performance.

The new language lab has come a long way from the cubicle setting and formatted class design and now can boast of an open learning environ which is more interactive, and exciting. This user friendly, open environment allows the students to enjoy equal audio-visual clarity and gives them the freedom of eye-to-eye contact with the instructor. The language laboratory is a very helpful tool for practicing and assessing one’s speech in any language. It provides a facility which allows the student to listen to model pronunciation, repeat and record the same, listen to their performance and compare with the model, and do self-assessment.

From the above, one can conclude that a successful implementation of the communicative method of teaching English makes it imperative that the institute possess a language lab. But in a country like ours, the problems are numerous. Generally language classes are conducted as theory classes with 100-150 students in a class. There is no lab syllabus. When Institutes decide to have labs, they find language labs are pretty expensive to set up. There are labs which need designated space and in old institutes there is lack of space and funding; in the new ones the number of students is so high that it is difficult to accommodate them at the same time. A lab meant for 40 or 60 student would fail to meet the requirements as the teacher will not be able to focus or give time to all the students. Essentially a lab with 20-25 students is the ideal one. Another question is about the number of hours to be used in the lab. Going to the lab for 1 or 3 hours a week doesn’t serve the purpose. One needs to visit the lab daily and be engaged in various language activities. In reality, students hardly find the time to engage in the lab apart from the scheduled hours in the course of study. It is not feasible for the language teacher to engage lecture classes and then be present in the lab throughout the day. One needs trained assistants to help students whenever they come to the lab. And most government institutes do not have such trained personnel and the new ones do not have the authority to appoint many assistants.

If these basic problems are sorted out and a language syllabus with adequate number of lab hours is put in place only then language teaching and learning can be a fulfilling task. Till then we will just be pouring in money in labs and equipments without achieving the necessary ends.