Words Worth Blog

Enhance your Communication Skills through Language Laboratories

A language laboratory is an audio or audio-visual system used as a teaching tool in language teaching. Among other places,  schools, universities and other institutions use language labs to enhance the teaching-learning experience of any given language.

Language  labs are so designed to enhance communication skills. These programmes are tools to increase learners’ participation and interaction while going through the course. This facilitates acceleration in comprehensive language learning, with all the four skills being completely addressed. The highly interactive nature of language labs boosts high motivation among students. The audio-visual support to language learning is largely seen to be responsible for this furtherance to self confidence, in the use of the target language.

One cannot deny that, language labs never fail to add a novelty factor to a teaching environment. Learners have been found to find the use of language labs very exciting. They perceive labs as more exciting and feel free of the boredom associated with studying in regular classrooms. The conducive environment so developed through psychological perception enhances the learning ability of students. The variety of learning material that a language lab provides also stimulates their desire to learn.

Where on one hand, language labs provide variety in teaching material and learning environment, they can personalise teaching-learning needs to a large extent. This translates to a highly stimulating and need based content for the learners, adding to their motivation level.

Language labs are of great use both for school students and for working professionals. The labs are generally complete learning solutions, allowing the learners to enhance all the language skills. Added to this is the  benefit of self-paced learning. The learners are able to practice at the pace most suitable to their ability. This is normally not possible in a regular classroom.

Language laboratories are beneficial to teachers too. The participatory environment created through the use of a language lab ensures the transference of language skills which may in a regular class be lost due to time constraint. The individual attention that a learner gets, with the teacher being able to monitor and manage their learning-growth, increases the efficiency of the learners. The role of a teacher is enhanced to that of a motivator and facilitator in the learning of a language. The teaching objectives of the teacher are met well; positive results of a lesson being assured.

Thus we see, language labs are ideal systems for learning language. They are complete tools for the teachers and students that completely blend together technology and language content to facilitate teaching delivery and language learning.