Improving listening comprehension and oral English have always been the objectives of the lab course designed for the freshmen and sophomores at Soochow University. Since the beginning of last academic year, there has been dramatic change with the curriculum--the replacing of traditional audio tapes with video tapes as the core text materials. It was an adventurous decision because at the time most of the language lab programs in other universities were still using conventional audio tapes. In this paper, the outcome of this change will be evaluated from three perspectives with the hope that others will experiment with similar courses. First, a survey of 2,974 students who had experience in lab courses Ⅰ& Ⅱ in using audio tapes and video tapes respectively will be described and examined statistically in some detail. Then, the results of the survey of 18 teachers who used video tapes for teaching sophomores in the academic year of 1992 will be discussed. Thirdly, in order to corroborate the results of the above surveys, an exercise was conducted among 468 selected students, and the results will be examined and compared with the survey results. After reporting the primary results of the surveys, their implications for the lab course in university will be further discussed.