In the Class

As we have seen earlier, the natural speed and pronunciation of the utterances should be maintained throughout. Some teachers think that the pace of instruction could be accelerated if the learners achieve sufficient knowledge of the item. But 'sufficient' cannot be sufficient to accelerate his drill. The slow or high speed of utterance not only destroys the pronunciations, but puts the learners in difficulty in comprehending Target Language in natural real life situations. The learners can get to understand and speak at a normal speed in a conversation through constant practice in the foreign language. Even the teacher should not try to slow down his speech for the learners, which would hamper the states of acquisition also.

It is advisable to administer the drills immediately after the presentation of the lesson, which would keep a good tempo. It is very important that the teacher should be enthusiastic and alert at all times. Any relaxation or boredom caused by the teacher will immediately reflect on the learners. The teacher must listen carefully to the responses given by the learners to locate the errors if any. If the repetition is not upto the standard or is incorrect or inaccurate, he should make them repeat more frequently with breaks in-between till they get a mastery over that.

It is assumed that the chorus drill always precedes the individual drill. This procedure is followed throughout the proceed of administering drills. When the transition from chorus to individual is effected, it is better to choose the brighter learners first so that others can have more opportunity to listen to thus providing more time to practice. This never means that this should be done always because the other learners who are given chances later may feel it and they may develop some inferiority complex.

The teacher may administer individual drill first and then switch on to chorus drill later to break the monotony of having only one kind of drill allthrough. The teacher may decide upon the kinds of drill he wants to administer in the class

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In the Language Laboratory

Dakin (1973) mentions that the language laboratory is always an effective tool actively used in language teaching. This however does not mean that the foreign language teaching. This however does not mean that the laboratory or the other audio-visual aids put together can be substituted for the classroom teacher. In other words, the mechanical gadgets used for the purpose of language teaching could be only supplementary to the classroom instructions.

The most important and salient feature of the language laboratory is that each individual learner using the language laboratory can be attended to on an even basis which is not possible in the classroom. This being the case the utility of language laboratory becomes particularly significant in the administration of language drills to improvise the spoken skills of the learners starting from pronunciation.

Language drills could be either two phase or three phase or even four phase. The two phase drill provides the stimulus and a response whereas the three phase drill provides reinforcement of the stimulus following the learners' response and the four phase drill provides another opportunity for the learner to repeat his utterance a second time to make his pronunciation more perfect

Although this kind of exercise is essential particularly in the case of second and foreign language teaching, specifically in the beginning stages or the early stages, the administration of four phase drill somehow becomes impossible or very difficult to be used in a classroom situation from the point of view of the time taken in the case of each individual and also from the point of view of keeping all the learners busy all through the time. For this reason and for better achievements of the learners, the four phase drill could be easily and effectively administered through the language laboratory avoiding the factors of wastage of time and boredom to the others. Thus the laboratory could not only be used for the phonetic drills, but for almost all the other varieties of drills also.

In addition to the administration of drills, the role of language laboratory in language teaching becomes very significant from the point of view of developing listening comprehension among the learners and also to some extent the reading rate. The laboratory is preferred to the classroom for purposes of listening comprehension because the material presented could be made available to each of the learners with the same tone without distortion. This avoids the factors of some people listening loudly and others in very low tone. At the same time when the comprehension passage has to be administered more than once to the
learners, in a classroom there might be variations with respect to intonation, stress, tone, etc. These factors could be minimised or avoided if the material is recorded on tape once and only once. The same can be played back if required Attempts could be made to improvise the reading speed among the learners by administering the material through the language laboratory for listening purposes and simultaneously providing the same material on a printed page to the learners. Thus the learners are expected to read the printed page as they listen to the material on tape.

Another added advantage of the language laboratory is that it could cater to the needs of different categories of learners if there is a parity in their achievements of the language. It can also provide facilities for inter-communication among them and give opportunities for the learners to come in contact with the teacher without the knowledge of others and get their doubts clarified. The laboratory has been found to be extremely useful in the context of language testing particularly with preferences to the testing of oral skills. These are in short major advantages of the language laboratory with reference to language teaching learning.

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