The Speaking lab is a special room at Nagoya University of Foreign Studies (NUFS) for videotaping student oral practice. It is used regularly by Oral Communication Program teachers as a tool to complement student speaking practice in the classroom.

The Speaking Lab contains 10 booths. Each booth is outfitted with a video camera, a microphone, and two video tape recorders. Students sit facing the camera behind a table with a microphone on it.

When students enter the booth, they

place their video tapes in the VTR,
press the red record button,
sit at the table in front of the mic, and
begin talking.

Teachers inform students of the speaking task ahead of time. When students are finished, they stand up, take their tapes, and go back to the classroom.

Through this method, the speaking lab can accommodate up to 20 students -- an entire oral communication class -- at a time. Additionally, the speaking lab can be used by up to 4 teachers in a 90-minute period.

Oral communication students can get anywhere from 3 - 6 videotaped speaking practices each semester with the Speaking Lab.

Students look at their videos for homework, with assignments that vary from teacher to teacher. Some students are required to fill out a form, other students to make a transcript of the conversation. Students get several benefits of reviewing a captured recording of their own oral output: they can test their hypothesis about the target language; they can see how they look & sound when they speak English; they can compare it to past and future recordings to examine their own improvement. Attending consciously to features of their oral output (and their partner's output), for some learners, may make the difference between learning and just attending class.