India to donate a Language Lab to Mauritius

The announcement was made yesterday at a meeting in Mauritius between a delegation headed by Mrs Preeti Saran, Secretary (East), attached at the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, and officials from the Government of Mauritius. India will donate a Language Lab to Mauritius on the occasion of the 11th World Hindi Conference which will be held in our island from 18 to 20 August 2018.

 Such a gesture from the Indian Government shows that the latter cares for the progress and development of our tiny nation. In fact, it has showed it in many ways, right from our independence, 50 years ago, till this day. The recent ones being the Cybercity, the Swami Vivekananda International Conference Centre, the Court House and the Metro-Express. Now comes a Language Laboratory.

 This Language Lab will be an important tool in the teaching and the learning of Hindi in this modern era where there are lots of mispronunciations and where languages are distorted vocally. Such practices sound bad to our ears, particularly when we listen to the audio-visual media.

 Just what is a language lab ? It is an audio or audio-visual installation used as an aid in modern language teaching. They can be found, amongst other places, in schools, universities and academies. Up until the 1990s, they were tape-based systems using reel to reel cassette. Current installations are generally multimedia personal computers. The traditional system generally comprises a master console (teacher position) which is electrically connected to a number of rows of student booths, typically containing a student tape recorder and headset with a microphone.

 Today, the language lab has gone digital or a “just software” solution. Software only systems can be easily installed onto an existing PC based network, making them both multi locational in their access and much more feature rich in how and what media they manage. The content that is now used in the new language labs is much richer and self authored or free : now not just audio, but video, flash based games, internet etc. and the speed and variety of the delivery of media from teacher to student, student to teacher, is much quicker and therefore much more engaging for both teacher and student.

 Students can now access and work from these new “cloud” labs from their own devices at any time and anywhere. They can interrogate and record audio and video files and be marked and assessed by their teachers remotely. The principle of a language lab essentially has not changed. They are still a teacher-controlled system connected to a number of student booths, containing a student’s control mechanism and a headset with a microphone. 

 So, let us all say thank you India for this generous donation!

Posted by Minority Voice on Mar 21 2018. Filed under Economie, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry