The expanded capabilities of today's language lab offer children an intense experience of language and culture and support the drier exercises of language learning. The lab is a subtle tool, capable of wrapping the children in sounds and images, transporting them to new worlds, and engaging their imaginations.
Advanced Equipment
The language lab I use—a Sony 9000 console that routes audio, video, and computer signals to 24 student stations—allows complete student-teacher interaction. As many as eight students can work together, and any or all members of that group can be models for the whole class. The power of the machine lies in its ability to deliver two visual streams and two sound streams simultaneously.
A ceiling-mounted television receives videotape, cable, satellite, or Elmo projector signals from the Sony console. The Elmo projector—a visual presenter or document camera—allows the teacher to display transparencies, photographs, paintings, or three-dimensional objects on either the student video screens or the television. With the Elmo overhead projector, the console can deliver two video streams. For example, the large television screen might display material from the VCR while the individual stations display commentary or vocabulary from the Elmo projector.
Two sound streams are also available. Students might listen to a tape or video soundtrack while receiving commentary or accompaniment from the mix feature, which combines the voice of the person operating the console with any other audio source. Thus, a teacher can turn any authentic document—text or video—previously beyond the students' ability into pedagogical material by using the interpretative capacity of the console.
Preparing the Content
Certainly, this new technology places demands on the teacher who must work within a sequenced curriculum. Most children are enrolled in courses that introduce, reinforce, and assess grammar and vocabulary in a smooth continuum that allows teachers to use prepackaged aids and tests to coordinate the curriculum and to obtain external validation and confidence. Texts often come with laboratory manuals and ready-made videos that reassure the teacher that the course is being advanced in the language lab.
But the versatility of the language lab doesn't confine its use to mere distraction or periodic relief from the sequenced curriculum. How can a teacher integrate the lab's expanded capabilities? My own answer required a detailed knowledge of the textbooks. I began by making a complete list of the vocabulary and the grammar structures in the textbooks. Using general categories of vocabulary was not sufficient. For example, "the house" in the French I textbook might involve the living room, kitchen, and bedrooms, whereas the French II textbook might add the basement and the attic.
The task was tedious but necessary to ensure that I could clearly substitute another technology for the technology of the textbook without straying into areas of study that wouldn't be reinforced. I posted a detailed list of every noun, verb, and grammar rule contained in the textbooks of French I through III on the school's Web site and gave each student a hard copy.
Apples
I designed a special language laboratory event to introduce and reinforce the vocabulary of animals, colors, simple adjectives, fruits, flowers, and natural landscapes for a group of 8th graders. My lesson props are a basket with two large stuffed mice; a bear; and two huge apples, one red and one gold. Like most language teachers, I regret that children must learn the words for earthy, natural things from word lists and little static pictures. The following dialogues are improvisations that I do while holding the stuffed animals as puppets and speaking in basic French sentences that the children understand and that reinforce earlier lessons.
The big overhead screen and the children's personal screens receive material from the Elmo projector. I place the red apple under the projector, play the light on the apple, then move away to my mice, who begin a simple conversation about the apple, its redness, and its delicious appearance. I offer the red apple to the mice, who ask me to put it in the basket. I repeat the procedure with the gold apple. Yes, the mice would also like this in their basket. Now I have nothing on the screen. At this point we put on headsets. I begin to sing quietly: J'ai des pommes dans mon panie (I've got apples in my basket)Une verte a garder (One green to save)Une jaune bien dorée (One golden yellow)Une rouge pour croquer(One red to crunch)
We play "I sing a line, you sing a line." After three rounds of singing, I place under the overhead projector the script, which the children copy into their notebooks. The bear declares that he doesn't have any apples and that he doesn't like mice because they are not nice to bears. The mice kindly offer the apples to him.
I show prepared flashcards over the Elmo system. These pictures of rivers, streams, hills, flowers, and farm animals coordinate with the vocabulary of the textbook. I keep repeating the words, but I don't show words, only pictures. Interspersed are several pictures of bears and several pictures of mice—some pink Disneyesque versions and some rodent types. I begin to chant softly: Quelle heure est-il? (What's the time?)Il est midi. (It's noon.)Qui vous l'a dit? (Who told you so?)La petite souris (The little mouse)Où donc est-elle? (Where is she then?)À la chapelle. . . . (At the chapel. . . . )
The students repeat the lines. I choose lead voices, using the model voice feature, then I get boys to alternate with girls. I pass the script of the rhyme under the Elmo projector for the students to copy.
Now the stuffed bear offers the two apples to the students, engaging them in remarks like "Would you like this beautiful apple?" that repeat the initial vocabulary of the lesson. Les pommes get passed around the room.
I present the third and last rhyme: Une souris verte (A green mouse)Qui courait dans l'herbe (Who was running in the grass)Je l'attrappe par la queue (I catch it by the tail)Je la montre à ces messieurs. . . . (I show it to these gentlemen. . . . )
The students have learned three traditional French nursery rhymes and have become accustomed to the French rhythms and idioms. This is the moment I've been building toward. I show a video of Bonne nuit les enfants, a TV show that has aired nightly for years in France. I use an episode in which Pimprenelle and Nicolas are showing Grand Nounours, the bear, what they learned in school that day. As the video advances on the overhead projector, the students show delight when they hear the puppets on the video sing the nursery rhymes they've learned. As part of a shared world, they are learning something familiar to every French child. As the puppets sing the rhymes, the written text appears on the children's personal screens. Eight students are grouped through the console and join in with the singing on the video. At this point in the class, I am exploiting the audiovisual system to the fullest, and the students are going full tilt, spontaneous and happy.
Arias
The language laboratory can supplement as well as advance a course. The problem of integration is quite different for enrichment: Most texts usually contain news items, cultural comparisons, and features such as "a day in the life of Dépardieu." Because these sections usually don't advance the structured content of a textbook, I can easily eliminate them for the sake of adding something more vital or interactive without fragmenting the curriculum.
Once again, the technique of deconstructing a document or video has proved useful and flexible in the language lab. I choose a painting, a poem, an aria, or a nursery rhyme of intrinsic value: something that illustrates or manifests an aspect of a culture. Rather than introduce the students to the perfectly realized final product, I allow them to participate in the stages of its creation. Only then do I let them in on the final product.
For a group of 4th year French students in grade 11, I wanted to substitute enrichment material for a banal textbook piece about the arts in France. I chose my text from the opera Mignon: the famous aria of Philine, "Je Suis Titania." We had been working on a set of verbs, suivre (to follow), luir (to shine), and fuire (to flee), which are exemplified in the verse, but my real motive was to open the students to an unfamiliar area of French culture. First, our French coordinator, a former drama student, made a recording of the script. Next, groups of students prepared their own recordings. They then searched the library for paintings that best exemplified the mood and characters of the "poem" and brought the painting, labeled in French, to the language lab. Each student took over the console to describe the features of his or her chosen painting. As a group, we voted for the one we liked best and projected this image over the large screen. We recited the poem as a student pointed to each item mentioned.
Only then did I introduce the idea that they were about to hear something that they might love or hate. Over the console, I played a tape of soprano Kathleen Battle singing the aria (Thomas, 1996), with the words showing on the large Elmo screen. I then removed the script and played the aria again, this time with the labeled painting on the screen. I don't know how the students might have reacted had they heard the music without preparation, but at the end of the class, a great swell of voices asked to borrow the tape, which was passed among class members for some time.
Preparing for a Trip
I planned to take a small class of juniors and seniors to France and wanted them to have a personal and connected experience of Versailles, a place that can appear in its modern manifestation as a forbidding repository of faded glory. To help them glimpse the characters, ministers, and artists gathered at Versailles who would come to influence the whole western world, we explored a microcosmic culture dominated largely by the personal charisma of one man, Louis XIV.
For the lab session, I gathered a variety of documents, including extracts from the diaries of Louis de Rouvroy Saint-Simon, which I carefully prepared with glossaries and placed on the Elmo screen. The music of Jean-Philippe Rameau and Jean-Baptiste Lully played through the system while my voice-over of the script came through the mix feature. Portraits of Louis dancing in a ballet and posing with his children and grandchildren followed.
The center of the reading was a collection of vignettes by Andre Maurois (1955) describing Louis Le Vau, Charles Le Brun, and André Le Nôtre, architect, decorator, and gardener of Versailles, respectively. I hoped to emphasize the strange mixture in Louis XIV of dignity, courtesy, and intimacy that his contemporaries record. Without the music, the students might not have entered fully into this exploration. Through the capabilities of the language lab, the script, the interpretive music, and the pictures brought to life a world that is easily reduced to a cliché.
In my experience, students often fear that technology will reduce them to passivity, to endless comprehension exercises from textbook-generated videos that require them to check box A or box B on a worksheet from the accompanying lab manual. Singing, reciting, and annotating pictures and texts place the students themselves at the heart of the media event. They elevate the students and give dignity and delight to learning.
The language console comes into its own when it brings the treasury of a foreign culture into the classroom. Students advance their knowledge of grammar and vocabulary while entering into the particular sensibility of the country and, for a time, actually participating in its culture.
