The language laboratory is an audio or audio-visual installation used as an aid in modern language teaching. Army Public School Kanpur’s Language laboratories (Primary and Senior wings) provide practices in listening comprehension, speaking (listen and repeat), with the goal to reinforce the grammar, vocabulary and functions (grammatical structures) presented in class. The purpose of a language lab is to involve students to actively participate in language learning exercises and get more practice than otherwise possible in a traditional classroom environment.
Components in our Language Lab
- Teacher has a computer with appropriate software for conducting language exercises.
- Teacher and students wear headsets that block outside sounds and disturbances.
- Students have a media player/recorder for listening to audio and recording speech.
- Teacher and student’s positions are connected via LAN (local area network), in some cases also via separate audio cabling.
- A server computer or a separate storage device is often used to store lesson materials in a digital format.
The Computer Assisted Language Laboratory (CALL) uses computer to teach language. The course materials are already fed into the computer and are displayed according to the features available in the system (Wordsworth Software).
With our well equipped language lab, our students in the class can speak simultaneously without distracting one another regardless of the class size. It offers students an enjoyable and structured e-Learning environment that is successful and reliable. The headset/microphone provides students with a psychological privacy that promotes their four main language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. It also reduces the inhibitions felt in normal classroom situations. Essentially a lab with 20-25 students is the ideal one. Students learn more comprehensively through a language lab, using more class time instead to achieve these three main objectives:
- Self-learning: The student progresses in a self-guided but structured and progressive training to achieve the goals and objective set by the school or educational body.
- Complimentary: Language labs allow students to reinforce material learned in class by putting them into practice through interactive activities.
- Monitoring and Evaluation: Teachers know the progress of each student and receive reports of strengths and weaknesses to better adapt the classroom activities.