Digital Language Lab For usage by students or for inspection purposes?
Blog by a retired professor

Digital Language lab or English language lab

Digital English language lab is mandatory for a few universities and CBSE schools. It is very unfortunate that despite knowing the importance of English in the career, institutions do not give priority to improving English skills.

Knowing the importance of English

the authorities have made Language labs a mandatory requirement for many universities and agricultural universities Engineering colleges and schools.

I have personally gone for inspection in many colleges and noticed that they use some spoken English DVDs and try to convince us that this is a language lab. I might have done inspections in hundreds of institutes in 20 years. Only 5 % of the college use language labs even that to borrowed from UK or USA.

Language labs imported from USA or UK or some other foreign countries might not fit our students, especially rural area students. Having said this even urban area students also find it difficult to use. Matter of fact even English teacher also finds it difficult in using the imported language labs.

What is the point of having such language labs, which are costly but not useful?

Language lab is just not a piece of software. The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) has given few guidelines to teach English in a structured way.

Following the guidelines of CEFR

Language labs are made. Language lab is a combination of many skilled English professors, authors, narrators, teachers, and many more experts who have jointly sat with the development team and made this software.

Unfortunately, this software is just made available for authorities when they come for an inspection. Once the inspection is done, a tick mark is made in the checklist, then no one bothers about the language lab.

Every institution has excellent computer labs connected to a network and with excellent ambience. These are only shown for inspection purposes or for the parents who visit the institution before taking admission. When such beautiful infrastructure is available and awesome software is available then what is stopping the administration from making the software available to every student?

Let the English language lab is loaded in all the PCs. Whenever the student is free, they will come and explore for some time. Language lab is made in such a way that no faculty is needed to train them. It’s self-guided software, especially Digital Teacher English language lab.

Unfortunately, I came to know about Digital Teacher Language lab in recent times, had I known earlier, I would have recommended to all the colleges to use this.

Digital teacher English Language lab is 100% suitable for Indian students and the accent used is Indian or natural which is very easy to understand.

I am super impressed by the section on Phonetics and soft skills life skills and vocabulary builder.

LSRW, Listening, speaking reading, and writing sections are anyway good but vocabulary builder is something that I have never seen in my career.

Even I don’t know many vocabularies used or explained.

It’s really to boon to students to use the Digital Teacher English language lab.

Recently I have recommended to a few institutes to use Digital teacher software in their labs. They were asking me; how much was my commission to recommend the product.

This is the type of people, and administrators we are filled in the institutions. You cannot even promote something you like. People will think this man must be having some hidden interest in promoting the product/software.

Having said all, this is my recommendation to use a Digital teacher Language lab in your educational institutions. You take a full demo of the software and then decide if I was right or wrong.

Lastly, I will sum-up, up by giving a small example. Humans are social animals. We are talking about globalization. It means communication across the globe. How do u communicate? Using language.

If you want to express something exactly to another person, you need skills of communication, which comes if you have a hold of good vocabulary, speaking and understanding skills.

English is important to grow in your career, Language lab is a tool to achieve your goals.
Best of luck.

Madhusudhan
Retired Professor
SCERT (AV Education)