What's Wrong With Our Tape Recordings?

Abstract

IN THE last several years, there has been a steady increase in the time being made available to the foreign language teacher for lesson preparation. This has been made possible in some measure by the ability of the language laboratory to take over the seemingly tedious, yet absolutely necessary, task of giving the student grammatically correct utterances in sufficient quantity to enable the overlearning of the spoken language. Unfortunately, in the rush to be able to say that they are producing foreign language materials which contain the latest methodologies, some publishers have not been as careful as they could be to control the quality of one of the most important links in this chain of learning: the tape recordings. We want here to examine some of the facets of the tape recording system as it is used in the language laboratory. Hopefully, this will help you both to detect and to identify some of the more common tape faults and also help you to maintain peak equipment performance at all times. Your careful attention given to the following suggestions and principles may help spell the difference between your students' success or failure in the desired end result of your language laboratory program: namely, a proper grasp of the language after hearing only undistorted, natural reproduction of the voices of native speakers. This, in turn, can help to open up to them that satisfying and even exciting world of the appreciation of another culture. If these suggestions are ignored, in whole or in part, the recorded materials you are using may be encouraging a rejection by the student of any further attempts to introduce him to this culture, particularly after he has been exposed to mushy, noisy, raspy-or just dull recordings. This article discusses several of the possible of the original speech and is intended primarily for you, as a foreign language instructor, to enable you to recognize inferior materials. It is intended in addition, if you are a tape producer or editor, to remind you of your responsibilities in the areas of quality control and to encourage you to meet more than barelyminimum standards of production. In our continuing program of the evaluation of currently-available tape-recorded materials, we have discovered many examples of the types of distortion discussed in this paper. The student who is exposed to these inferior materials may not know why his interest in the subject matter lags, but often these defects will increase both his mental and his physical fatigue with the attendant negative contribution to the learning process, and will tend to nullify the effect both of your classroom teaching and of excellent visual aids that are now available. With the advent of the hi-fi buff, high-quality tape recorders have become available for modest prices. The tape recording system does have certain restrictions, however, within which the spoken material must confine itself for best results. Ignoring these restrictions will produce a variety of distortions of the original speech. Possible reasons for these are discussed below. The tape recorder is essentially a device which accepts and amplifies the electrical output of a microphone to produce a changing magnetic field in the record head. The magnetically-sensitive tape is drawn past this head at a constant speed, producing a magnetic voice pattern on the tape. In the operation, the voice pattern is drawn past the playback head, which, from the magnetic pattern, induces an electrical signal into a coil of wire. The signal is then amplified to operate either a loudspeaker or the students' earphones.