Language lab
Language labs were common in schools and universities in the United States in the two decades following World War II.
This institute was called Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), and that could be considered as the time language lab existed in the real world (Plate, 2015).
[1] In the 1940s, linguists at the University of Michigan developed the behaviorist audio-lingual method of foreign language learning.
[1] In 1958, the National Defense Education Act authorized federal financial assistance for American secondary school foreign language programs.
[1] Usage of the audio-lingual method also declined following Noam Chomsky's criticism of behaviorist models of language learning.
Teachers and students have earphones and microphones, so it is a language laboratory that can carry out question-and-answer dialogues, has two-way voice transmission function, and generally has soundproof seats.
Visual images such as slideshows, movies, and videos can be played at the same time to create real and vivid language situations.
From a technological point of view, this overdubbing was made possible by use of a two-channel tape recorder Language laboratories in the 1970s and 1980s received a bad reputation due to breakdowns.
Many had no way to stop the tape running off the reel in fast rewind or forward wind, which meant time wasting and greater chances of failure through misuse.
[6] The tape recorders in use after the early 1970s in the language laboratory were more complex than those in the home, being capable of multitracking and electronic remote control(sihite, 2017).
The installations were usually maintained under contract by service engineers, but these often served a county or similar wide area, and would only call at three-monthly intervals{sihite, 2017}.
However, the advent of affordable multimedia capable PCs in the late 1990s led to a resurgence and transformation of the language laboratory with software and hard drives in place of reels of analogue tape(Cuban, 1993).
In the 1990s new digital, hybrid PC based systems allowed extended functionality, in terms of better "management' of student / teacher audio with some levels of internet and video formats.
These days all professionally run networks are able to work with these ‘software only’ language lab solutions and deliver media synchronously.
Software only systems can be easily installed onto an existing PC-based network, making them both multi locational in their access and much more feature rich in how and what media they manage.
The content that is now used in the new language labs is much richer and self authored or free: now not just audio, but video, flash-based games, internet etc.
Further developments in language labs are now apparent as access moves from a fixed network and related Microsoft operating systems to online and browsers.
[7] Software-only systems can be located in one room, from room-to-room or campus-to-campus.The latest form of the Digital Language was brought out in the year 2000 from India(Warschuauer, 2004).
The next generation digital language labs allow teachers to monitor, control, deliver, group, display, review and collect, audio, video and web-based multimedia content.
Students can rewind, stop, start, go back to last silence, record, fast forward, repeat phrase and bookmark.
