The use of the language laboratory to help improve the SMA students' aural oral ability to communicate in English

As living creature, human being needs to communicate orally the another, through two activities: listening and speaking. These activities have been classified as the audio lingual skills of the language, and if we intend to master them, we have to practice listening and speaking using a great variety of drills from the simplest ones. Language laboratory is one of the technological teaching learning aids which has been utilized in several schools, in order to improve the students listening and speaking skills so as to enable them to communicate orally in their foreign language, i.e. English. However considering that language laboratory is quite expensive to install and maintaining at is important to find out whether it is really influential for developing those two skills, or it can be substituted by other teaching learning aids. Besides, the writer is also anxious to know how it influences the teaching and learning of listening and speaking. Then the writer came to observing each of those audio lingual skills, including the elements that should to considered to master listening and speaking. It was soon sound out that in order to listen with comprehension, it involve good mastery of recognizing the English sounds differentiating each of them from other sounds and then later comprehending English words, phrases, sentences and finally dialogues or reading passages. While in order to speak with quality, we must have good mastery at grammar, pronunciation including speaking, stress and intonations and fluency. All of these aspects an be learned through several drills, for examples: minimal pairs, repetition practice, responding to certain statements. Filling in the missing parts, dictation, dramatizing dialogues, modifying already-memorized dialogues, and others. And these drills are better done in a language laboratory, since language laboratory can provide good clarify of sound, untiring models of speech, and psychologically, it gives the students sense of individual since each student is equipped with an individual booth, by which he can work on his own speed, without getting embarrassed of being corrected if he makes errors. There are several types of language laboratory they are: Listen-Respond Laboratory, Listen-Respond Laboratory with Activated Headphones, Listen-Respond-Compare Laboratory, and Listen-Respond-Compare Laboratory with Remote Control. However, in this thesis, the writer decides to choose a Listen-Respond-Compare Laboratory for the application of teaching listening and speaking, since in this kind of laboratory each student is equipped with a tape recorder in this both, so as to enable him to record his own utterances and compare them with those of the native speakers as often as he likes, and therefore gives more opportunity to improve his quality of pronunciation and intonation. Several types of drills/ exercises which can be done in the language laboratory are also presented, in order to clarify the process of establishing listening and speaking abilities. Besides, it is also crucial to describe the equipments supporting a Listen-Respond-Compare Laboratory by which the teacher can mange a two way communication with his students, and the students have a freedom to work on their own pace or well. The examples of teaching and learning activities enclosed are intended to contribute clearer view about the application of audio lingual method in the teaching of listening and speaking using language laboratory. Hopefully, this study will encourage English teachers and SMA students to make use of language laboratory as an influential and helpful aid to master listening and speaking skills