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25 Mar

Role & Responsibilities of a Teacher in an English Language Lab

Language learning is not the same as learning other subjects. This is a skill, which can be enhanced optimally through the contributions of an efficient teacher. With digital language labs becoming the rule of the day, the teacher's role in language teaching has been misunderstood as being minimal. The roles and responsibilities of a teacher in a digital language lab are actually very important.

Language teaching cannot depend on technology alone. The teacher has to use her knowledge and skills to guide the learners towards the nuances of the English language while using the software of the language lab as an authentic tool for better teaching experience. His/her role being a model to language learning, s/he should possess good linguistic competence, great degree of accuracy in grammar and good understanding of phonetic knowledge. His/her proficiency in pronunciation should be ideal as a model for imitation.

Continuously guiding and motivating learners to efficiently acquiring the language, the teacher’s role in an English language lab is very crucial. H/she plays a large role in explaining and discussing language concepts to her learners. A good digital language lab is likely to provide the teacher with a software tool as support to teaching. Words Worth English language lab is one such software that provides software components, one exclusively for the use of teachers and onefor learners. The teacher should conjoin her own knowledge base with the content and strategies provided in the teacher’s software for a more effective and fruitful lesson delivery. The learners should use the computer based language lab only as an extension to the conceptual learning taking place in the classroom environment. Nowhere, should it be assumed that the role of a teacher is nullified when a digital language lab is set-up in an institution. His/her responsibility as a facilitator to language acquisition and retention is too huge to simply leave the teaching-learning aspect to the content available in the form of software.

In fact, his/her main focus as a language teacher should be to ensure the optimal acquisition of English language by the learners and to motivate them to continuously upgrade their language skills. By demonstrating the fundamentals in the classroom teaching scenario, h/she establishes the learning on a more permanent basis than by merely allowing them to use the concepts individually on the software.