“A Language Laboratory” is a specially designed room where students may practice speaking and listening with the aid of tape-recorders, earphones, microphones and/or other sound equipment chiefly as an audio-lingual supplement to the class work. In a language laboratory, students practice the second languages they are studying. It is a place mainly for improving listening skill through “audio-machinery”.

Listening skill is mostly neglected during the classroom activities and this skill is given adequate importance in the language laboratory. The language lab provides good models of the speech in English language for imitation and manipulation by the students. The language lab plays a great role when the teacher who is not a native speakers of a second language and when he has not achieved complete native pronunciation. It also increases the ability to listen by permitting the students to hear a variety of the language. So it is also called the “listening library”.

The language lab is only an aid for language learning. It is not substitute for a language teacher.

1. All the lessons will not be taught through the language lab.
2. The tape-recorded materials used in the lab are designed to supplement the class work selectively.

Lab materials have to be prepared with more care than any other materials for teaching. They must be clear, graded, and purposeful and based on linguistic facts and psychological principles of learning. Merely recording something to use in the lab does not make it a good exercise. The materials for the language lab should be partial material rather than complete lessons. They should be, for example, exercise for the difficult problems that will require extra-work that would take too much time in class.

Learning materials used in the laboratory are practice exercises in which the student may:

1. Listen and speak to show improvement in English.
2. Listen and speak with self-correction from the reinforcing response that follows his own attempt on the tape.
3. Listen and write either in dictation or in a response of some kinds such as identification of a number or a word. Students do a good deal of listening in any lab drill. They listen to good models with proper pronunciation, pause and intonation patterns.

Though a language lab is the most prominent place among the technological aid in language teaching, it has its own limitations.

1. It is more difficult and expensive to produce good materials for the language lab.
2. The prepared materials soon become outdated.
3. The English teacher is not in position to spend more time in preparing suitable lab materials besides preparing the lessons for the class, giving tests, correction works, etc.