Overview
Brac University Listening Lab focuses on three basic principles to help students get the best out of their skills: Reinforcing, Enhancing & Providing a Relaxed Setup. By ensuring all the three above mentioned facts, listening lab aims at developing materials and bridging the newer concepts to improve listening so that maximum exposure to the target language can be guaranteed. In short, this lab is designed in a way that all the learners of BRAC University, whether a good, mediocre or struggling listener, can have some room to polish his listening faculty as instructed by the teacher or out of self-realization. For this, the computers have been configured as per the necessity of different modules of as well as self-study practices. At first, listening lab helps battling learners achieve higher capability.
How it works?
The listening lab reinforces the abilities of a learner and tries to add some more to the practice done during his respective listening classes. This gives them a better understanding of their areas to improve and paves a way to get out of those dilemmas. After that, frequent utilization of the listening lab by all the learners will fortify their understanding abilities. For example, listening to a book read on tape may help someone perceive how the words on the page can wake up in an expressive manner. It helps one to concentrate on the qualities of words read without intrusion and gives a model of familiar inspecting. Audio books additionally provide for an essential prologue to listening, an expertise that one must excel in. For this, the listening lab has been furnished with a lot of documentaries, listening tracks, movies, songs and many other things. All these things a tied to separate worksheets by the respective teacher and students are to pop in whenever they have time and accomplish their tasks.
To add more convenience, they can send their answers directly to the teacher through email from the lab. Numerous books, tracks, movies and other listening materials have fascinating impacts that are particularly inspiring for them and using the lab during the gaps between the classes has always been proven fruitful to the students. Even if they want, they may check out the folders arranged as per their lessons. The lab is specifically useful for them who aspire to know more beyond the classroom or for those who have missed something in the class as this lab also offers their classroom materials more intensively. Moreover, this lab aspires to afford some extra room for the students who feel shy in the classroom to share their problems with listening or for those who do not have the opportunity to practice listening outside the classroom. All these facts have been turned into a reality by furnishing the lab with a large number of books, listening materials of all the six languages and last but not the list, a wide collection of worksheets to help them be a better listener over time.
Weekly listening activity
The listening lab arranges weekly activity on listening. It is an open to all activity which has been designed to bridle their listening skills in an interesting way. For instance, during the last semester activities like ‘Developing Presentation Skills’, ‘Private Detective’, ‘Memory Test’ and some other interesting activities were designed and the participation was noteworthy. For the management part, the lab is administered by a full time lab in charge. However, teachers are also assigned by rotation to employ their free times in developing the materials for listening lab and cultivating module integration. Nevertheless, listening lab is still quite a new born baby for BRAC Institute of Languages. So far we have been trying to give our best efforts so that it can be taken as a sustainable resource center by the students. We know that the forms of learning are ever changing and it sometimes creates quandary in selecting materials for the lab. From our part, we gladly accept the challenge and in a pretty near future, we hope to transform it into one of the prides of BRAC University by attaining world class quality.
Access and working hours
The listening lab is situated at UB21203 and has open access to all the students of Brac University. Anyone can use the lab from 9:30 am to 5:00 pm during the open days for the university.
Weekly Speaking Activity
Brac-Bil started arranging weekly speaking activity with the initiative of Jimalee Sowell, English Language Fellow from USA. With the inspirations by Lady Syeda Sarwat Abed, a team of faculty members from BIL have started arranging for weekly speaking activity since Fall 2014. Bil faculty members plan for the sessions, develop materials and conduct the workshops beyond classes for the development of the student’s English speaking abilities.
Objectives:
Our students need to practice speaking in English without stress. Thus, our objectives are:
To let the students practice speaking English in a fun environment having low affective filter
To create an interdependence learning environment for building good interpersonal skills
To Integrate all four skills for having a successful oral communication
When, Where, and Who:
Every semester teachers plan for weekly sessions. Students can do spot registration and attend the workshops. BRAC University Language and Communication Club provide their support in arranging the workshops by doing the advertisements throughout the university. The activities usually take place inside the listening lab (UB21203). The workshops are open for all BRAC University students.
Synopsis of previous works:
Till now our teachers have arranged for sessions on: General Public manners, Small talk, Questioning strategy, Conversational strategies, The Synergy factor: thinking out of the box, Presentation skills, various interactive games, Intonation Fun and so on, all of which involves the students into having ‘realia’ dialogues, engaging in conversations, having debates, coming up with new ideas and making sentences spontaneously and many more.
Vision:
To let our students feel more confident and easy with the verbal use of English
To prepare them well and help them to be ready for workplaces at their best
Mentoring
In pre-university we often get students from different socio-cultural and economic backgrounds. Most of these students are from Bangla medium and face a real hard time after being enrolled here.
Since a huge number of students are not comfortable with new metropolitan setting and new language system, it becomes a great challenge for the teachers to make the language class effective and interactive. In this situation, the teachers need to extend their helping hand beyond the classroom to bring a change in them. This actual scenario instigates us to introduce mentoring program in pre-university.
Pre-university mentoring program intends to support pre-university students during the transition part from pre-university to university by nurturing learners’ leadership skill and preparing them to become independent learners and successful university students. This part offers both the teachers and students a unique role to play.
Mentoring section is divided into two parts- arranging programs and doing counseling. These programs are engaging students in different activities like publishing wall magazine, doing open discussion etc. All these activities successfully promote students’ language learning and cultural awareness. Apart from that, a counseling session is conducted by the mentor who suggests a short action plan for the weak students for quick recovery.
Mentoring has a huge impact on the learners. Teachers report a positive change in students’ performance just after a few mentoring sessions. They become more active, motivated and enthusiastic learners. In the same way, students are also very positive about different mentoring activities. Their feedback and mentoring sessions reveal that they consider all the mentoring activities challenging and fruitful. Students recognize that it opens the window to think creatively and independently.