Mobile Language Lab Tours University

A 38-foot mobile language laboratory went on display around the University for the first time yesterday. The trailer, christened the Harvard-Arlington Instruction Van, is the heart of a co-operative project for teaching elementary French to 350 sixth-graders in the Arlington public schools.

Christine M. Gibson, Research Associate in Education and President of Language Research Incorporated, described the project as an exercise in "the cognitive psychology of understanding through comparing."

Language Research, situated in Peabody Hall, has designed the model van for use as a combined teaching, exercising, and testing unit using films and tapes for instruction.

Congolese Order Unit

According to Miss Gibson, a demonstration of the model in Washington so impressed Congolese diplomats that they promptly asked for a similar unit for use in the Congo. The van was returned from Washington early this week. The Arlington schools had been using it for less than ten days before it left for the capital city.

The builders plan to keep the van here for experimental teaching during the part of each week when it is not in use at Arlington.

A projector at the rear of the van flashes language films on a screen which the students can study from their individual booths. The ordinary procedure is to show words with accompanying line diagrams while the spoken word is piped to each of the booths. Then students can record later the phrases on tape for self-correction.

"A person can be communicating in very rudimentary fashion in the new language within the first half-hour," said Miss Gibson. "We can teach even complete illiterates to speak in a different tongue."