The Language Resource Center recently acquired four interactive video stations designed to help students sharpen their language skills.
Each station is equipped with a computer screen, a video monitor, a laser disk player and a CD ROM player.
The work stations allow students to hear and see language exercises. Students select an exercise on the computer screen and the dialogue is then acted out on the video monitor.
"It's a lot better than the tapes. You can see it and go at your own pace," said Lisa O'Brian '97.
When Keith Li '95, first used the work stations, he thought they were "high tech stuff." Now Li uses the works stations daily. "It's just a routine job," he said.
Otmar Foelsche, the Language Resource Center's director, said the "computers are here to change certain aspects of language instruction very dramatically. Conventional language instruction will change gradually."
The majority of the students who use the work stations are studying Japanese.
Mayumi Ishida, a professor of Japanese, uses the work stations as a word processor to design homework exercises for her students. "The computers are just perfect," she said. "They are definitely helpful."
New technology at the Center is paid for by the College with assistance from the Consortium of Language and Learning, the Sears Roebuck Foundation and the Charles Culper Foundation.
Videos and computers were first added in 1987, facilitating the development of the new language software by Foelsche and David Bantz, who is now with the University of Chicago.
"Computers can play a very important role in future language instruction because computers are getting better and better," Foelsche said.
Foelsche said in the future students will be able to listen to a sentence and see a complete dialogue shown as a Quick Time movie on a color computer monitor.
Inge Brown, the lab's assistant director, said the center is "a healthy place to work in, the Resource Center is constantly striving to build up better resources in terms of equipment to upgrade facilities."
The College is also working with Harvard University to develop dictionaries in French, German, English, Spanish and Italian.
For students who cannot use the Center's work stations, software for drill and language practice is available on the Euterpe file server within the HCDC file server in zone Bartlett.
