What is a language laboratory? What are its advantages?
Organizing Language Laboratory: Just as in science experiments to laboratories in schools and colleges students conduct learn concepts practically; in a language laboratory they experiment with linguistic skills in order to acquire them. Though the concept of the language laboratory had its birth in the USA it soon spread all over the globe with tremendous speed.
The laboratory has got a unique place in the teaching a foreign language like English. It is a room with electrical gadget and is meant for developing the correct speech habits among the learners. Electronic devices for recording and reproducing speech are provided here. The learners learn how to pronounce the sounds and stress and intonate the sentences in connected speech. The learners sit in semi sound-proof cubicles where they can listen to a master tape, and record their own responses in the tape recorder provided to them. Each learner is provided with a head set and a tape recorder. The teacher who is in control of the operation can speak to all or any one of the learners he wishes to speak, and help them in their learning.
Advantages of Language Laboratory:
- 1. The learner listens to the almost perfect speech of the expert rather than listening to the less than the perfect speech of the teacher.
- 2. Due to the presence of the electrical gadgets the learners are naturally attracted to the language laboratory, and thus pave the way for learning with interest.
- 3. It allows for self pace in learning. As such the learners are in no hurry to complete the task within a given schedule. This makes learning easy and interesting.
- 4. In the regular classroom the learner feels shy as he is listened to by the other students. But in the language laboratory this inhibition will not be there.
- 5. The teacher too can give instructions to the learners individually without disturbing the entire class.
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