The English language laboratory is an audio or audio-visual installation used as an aid in modern language teaching. They can be found, in schools, universities, and academies. It is a tool designed for teaching any language, to learn pronunciation, accent, stress and all other aspects of the phonetics of a language. Effective communicative training programmes for the general public, private and corporate sectors, junior and senior level officers can be given through the lab. Web-content creation, the setting up of in-house news magazines, corporate publicity and identity, and teaching materials can be generated through the language laboratory.
It is required of any learner to have a good command of the language for communication purposes, with clarity and accuracy being vital for effective and efficient communication. What helps one to acquire such proficiency in a language is the process and the method of learning that language. The curriculum of the present educational system in India does not have a laboratory session for arts subjects. Only those who study science subjects have practical work, which is undertaken in a laboratory. Hence, a laboratory for language learning is something new to Indian students, whereas it is very common in Western countries to train children in the laboratory to enrich their language learning experiences. There are very few truly software only solutions that just rely on installing designated language lab software onto a network and then directing just the original network to manage the media between teacher and student, student and student or student back to teacher. Software can be installed and accessed on any networked PC anywhere on a school, college, or university campus. Software-only systems can be located in one room, from room-to-room or campus-to-campus.
The sophisticated new software that are much better than the tedious continuous monitoring of the old.
The more sophisticated ‘software only’ labs have a higher level of teacher management and control over the student desktop. One of the key differences with the ‘high end’ ‘software only’ products is their ability to work ‘live’ with the students as they record and work with media. So instead of waiting to correct student recordings after they have been recorded and collected back it is now possible for a teacher to work synchronously and ‘live’ with students on their own, in pairs and in groups, thus enhancing the immediacy of the teaching and learning experience.