Revisiting the Language Lab in the Age of Online Learning: Videoconferencing, Teacher Feedback, and Learner Self-Correction

Abstract

Following the COVID-19 emergency and ensuing Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) practices, this chapter reflects on how learning strategies associated with the post-war technology of the language lab can inform contemporary teaching through technology—within blended, face-to-face, or predominantly online education settings. Based on a behaviourist approach, the foreign language lab was considered state of the art for schools and universities for most of the second half of the twentieth century. The concept was as compelling as it was faulty, assuming that the best results for language learners could be achieved through memorising pre-set sentence and dialogue structures. While the practice of oral pattern drills has been widely criticised and has long been considered out of date by theorists and practitioners alike, the focus on learners’ oral production, feedback, and self-correction offers some valuable lessons for today’s technology-enhanced language classroom. This chapter explores and expands on these topics and, in so doing, it also subsequently describes as exemplars a series of activities that were delivered in 2020–2021. In particular, the chapter explores how videoconferencing software allows learners to interact with each other in a virtual classroom setting while also enabling them, at a later stage, to analyse and correct their own language production, just as the language lab did. It will then demonstrate how some of the features of online language teaching can broaden teachers’ pedagogical toolbox within the sphere of formative feedback, even outside the need for social distancing.