ACOUSTICS: The language lab provides all students, no matter where they are seated in the room, equal opportunity to hear the instructor and to be heard by the instructor. Each student can listen to the lesson material at a level set by themselves for their own comfort. None of the lesson material is misheard due to the direct nature of the sound transmission heard by each student via his or her individual headset.
PRIVACY: The headset/microphone provides students with a psychological privacy that promotes their speaking ability. It reduces the inhibitions felt in normal classroom situations and encourages the shy student to speak. The instructor can speak to a single or group of students in privacy without disturbing the rest of the class.
ATTENTION: As the language lab allows the student to listen to the program stimulus individually, each individual student's attention is focused on the program material being studied, ultimately increasing the attention span of the student and teaching the student to listen and analyze the content of the lesson.
DEVELOPING LISTENING SKILLS: Listening skills are an essential element in becoming linguistically fluent. The language lab helps students develop good listening skills and aids the process of communication. Students hear the correct language patterns all the time through their headsets instead of mimicking other students who may be pronouncing incorrectly.
NATIVE SPEAKER/DIFFERENT VOICES: The lab provides the students with a variety of model voices rather than just the voice of the teacher (who is often not a native speaker). All modern systems have a Model Voice feature allowing a native speaker to converse and be used as a model voice subject for the rest of the class.