By Eze, Edith Evelyn
English language teachers have been used to the presentation method of language teaching. This situation has led to poor performance of students in some areas of English language studies. This study was designed to find the effect of digital language laboratory on teacher trainee’s achievement in oral English. A quasi experimental design which involved the use of intact classes was adopted for the study. There were three research questions which were answered while three hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. All the seventy-seven year one students of the department of language studies, Enugu State College of Education Technical, Enugu and sixty students of the department of English, Institute of Ecumenical Education Thinkers Corner, Enugu were used for the study. In assigning the subjects to control and experimental groups, the seventy-seven students of ESCET and sixty students from Ecumenical were used respectively. The experimental group was exposed to digital laboratory method while the control was exposed to the presentation method of teaching. The instrument used for the study was Oral Production Test. The scores obtained from the pretest were used for the item analysis and the calculation of the reliability indices. Applying Kuder Richard formula 20 the reliability indices of 0.98 was found.
The mean scores and the standard deviation were computed and were used for answering the research questions, while the analysis of variance was adopted to test the hypotheses. It was found that digital language laboratory method of teaching was significantly more effective than the presentation method in the teaching of oral English. The results of the study show that the use of digital language laboratory method enhances instruction on oral English. It was recommended that oral English teachers should adopt the use of digital language laboratory as a method of teaching phonetics and phonology.