The Rise and Fall of the Language Lab: A Cautionary Tale for SALCs

Starting with their humble beginnings as phonographs and listening tubes, language labs were first an oddity, then an extravagance, then a necessity, and finally a relic of many schools’ language learning systems. Now that self-access language learning centers have the limelight, it is useful to look back at the evolution of language labs for hints at how to avoid the mistakes made in their development and implementation. This article will detail the beginnings, heyday, and depreciation of the language lab. It will then look for parallels between SALCs and language labs and offer appropriate advice for the evolution of SALC facilities.