Because of the limited facilities, the lab was originally used only by Honours students; however, in 1965-66 a forty-position air-conditioned lab was installed in room 214 of the college. A Chester dial-access type, it was equipped with a monitor’s booth, sound-proof studio, and repair and maintenance workshop. In 1978 a thirty-nine-position cassette-type lab, with a technician’s workshop, was added in the large classroom across from the Chester lab. In this new facility, two large television monitors were suspended from the ceiling in front of the console room. Live television programmes or pre-recorded video tapes could be shown, with the soundtrack being transmitted to individual student headsets. Students

could thus watch television programmes while others work unimpeded on regular audio language drills. Each position was equipped with record-automatic recap-playback facilities, and the console was capable of programme dubbing at four times normal speed. The lab, which functions in a library (individual) mode, has offered at least five courses in the department and has catered to students from University College, New College, Woodsworth College, and the Faculty of Engineering.

In 1980-81 the Chester lab was remodelled and a new, fifteen-position Sony language lab and electronics classroom was installed in its place, along with a recording studio and director’s office. The facilities included ceiling-mounted television monitors and a projection screen, video recorders – u-matic and vhs – and an intonation visualizer for teaching speech prosody. In 1989 five ibm

personal computers were installed to provide access to a new computer-assisted learning (cal) system for an experimental section of a first-year credit course in French.

Beginning in 1950, phonetics classes at Victoria College were supplemented by recordings done on a Soundscriber housed in a third-_oor room in the old college building. Four years later the Soundscriber was replaced by a tape recorder, and in 1956 the first language laboratory was installed in the former Tuck Shop in the basement of the college. This comprised nine student positions, an oral room, and a control room. The lab functioned in a library (individual) mode, and the voice recordings of students were made twice a year. A second lab was built in 1961 in

the sub-basement of the new E.J. Pratt Library. It contained twenty-seven booths, an oral room, and a control room. Individual work and voice recordings were thus greatly enhanced. In 1964 voice recordings were replaced by a weekly lab hour for all students of phonetics.

The situation at Victoria College evolved greatly over the years. In the 1990s it has a Learning Centre containing a new cassette-type audio lab, a viewing room – video cassettes and film – and a computer lab containing both Macintosh and ibm personal computers. An experiment with “voice mail lab” (a telephone hook-up to the lab) has been introduced in order to provide students with the opportunity of doing certain lab exercises from a remote location. Although the centre has been used largely by students of French, it has provided access to students of other languages and of linguistics.

The Trinity College language laboratory was installed in 1960 and at that time contained twelve reel-to-reel student positions. The room in which the lab was housed underwent renovations two years later, and then in 1974 a new console, which incorporated a record player, was added and the student positions changed to the Sony cassette type. A second room was added in the 1970s. It housed a video cassette recorder, a large television monitor, and loudspeakers, making the room ideal for courses with an audio-visual component, such as oral practice classes, courses on cinema and the language of the media, and so on.

In the late sixties the first language laboratory, consisting of twenty student positions, was installed at St Michael’s College. It was a White lab, which was based on a master tape-loop. Under this system a model sentence or a referential stimulus was presented by the master tape and was immediately imitated or transformed in some way by the student in the time provided by the loop. At the end of the programmed response period, the correction (repetition of the model or the suitably transformed sentence) was automatically presented by the master tape. The length of time for the response could be changed by the instructor (for example, two seconds or three seconds) to alter the level of difficulty of the exercise. Thus the system allowed for a four-phase exercise: stimulus, response, confirmation, and correction.

Although this system had its merits, it had certain drawbacks, including the inability, on the student’s part, to repeat any exercise a second time or to play back and compare his or her response with the model. To provide these functions, a Chester dial-access lab similar to the one installed at University College in 1965 was put in place. The new lab consisted of two consoles each feeding a group of twenty positions. With this type of lab, the student could record the complete programme stimuli, responses, confirmation, and his or her own correction and then at the end of the programme, replay his/her tape and listen, correct, or redo any part of it at will.

In the mid eighties, twelve personal computers were added, with composite video monitors, so that each station could be used for computer-assisted courses, word processing, or reception of video programmes.

The newest college in the University of Toronto, Erindale has boasted one of the most up-to-date learning laboratories in the entire university. The original lab, a Conrak Elekron, dated back to 1969. It consisted of two rooms, each accommodating twenty students, who had individual control of tape recorders situated outside the room. Each room had a master console. In 1987 plans were drawn up to install the latest Sony micro-processor lab and two video monitors. The thirty-two-position lab was adjacent to a large room suitable for structured conversation classes. This configuration made it easy to incorporate lab drills and audio-visual facilities into oral practice classes. Thus maximum _exibility was provided for all oral/aural language training sessions.

More recently a computer lab has been installed to accommodate computer-assisted instruction (cai). The recall programme, devised by Erindale French instructors, has been used for machine-assisted syntax; a “parser” (devised at Guelph University by Professor Paramskas) and a grammar checker have also been available to students of French at the college. Second-year students have had access to a programme (developed by David Trott) that provides an initiation to the theory and practice of automated sentence analysis.

untiring efforts of C.D. Rouillard (at that time head of the Department of French at University College), Léon was able to purchase a sonograph, a basic tool for research in phonetics. With this machine he undertook research into the phonetics of the French language. This work was done in a classroom on the second _oor of University College, which served as office, lab, and seminar room. A bursary of $5,000 from the National Research Council in 1966-67 and a grant of $25,000 from the Canada Council enabled Léon to purchase more speech-analysis equipment and to begin, among other projects, long-needed studies of speech prosody. In September 1967 he and his small group of graduate assistants moved into 39 Queen’s Park Crescent, where they shared accommodation with the Department of Linguistics. With the added space – three offices, a seminar room, and an equipment room – more ambitious projects were undertaken and more graduate students attracted to Léon’s courses in phonetics

and phonostylistics. This increased activity led to the publishing in 1968 of the first volume in the series Studia Phonetica (Recherches sur la structure du français canadien). The series _ourished, and twenty more volumes were added in the ensuing years. Also in these years, studies in speech prosody were continued, and Phillipe Martin developed a reliable pitch visualizer. The publications generated by the epl expanded to include ten volumes in a collection entitled “3L (Langue, linguistique et littérature),” and Studia Phonetica was eventually supplemented by a new journal, Intonation/Communication, which published the working papers of the epl.

Over the years the epl has organized many colloquia, starting with its international symposium on “L’Analyse des faits prosodiques/ Prosodic Feature Analysis” in 1969 and progressing to such themes as didactique, esthétique, and discursivité.

One further sign of the vitality of the epl and its director (who regrettably retired in 1991) is the number of doctoral theses successfully completed at the lab. These have included five theses defended at three European universities, three in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto, and nine in the Department of French, on topics as varied as the accentuation of personal pronouns in French, the acquisition of correct speech prosody using a pitch visualizer, studies on French-Canadian phonetics and phonology, and studies in socio-linguistics.