I hooked up my belt drive turntable to my Phono Stage then through my Sound card then into my Macbook Laptop. Recorded a record with great results however I couldnt monitor the record whilst it was playing. Is that Normal? can I resolve the problem with adding an amplifier? Many Thanks

I'm not familiar with Macs so can't give you advice about this specific problem, but would like to make a general point. When ripping vinyl, it's better not to have any kind of monitoring through loudspeakers going on. The sound from the loudspeakers will impinge on the turntable and can slightly affect the quality of the transfer. (And this isn't just with cheap turntables - I use a Linn LP12 and the effect is still noticable). So if you want to monitor, use headphones.

Good luck with finding out how to switch on monitoring on the Mac. It's straightforward on a PC, so must surely be doable on a Mac. If it has some sort of mixer utility that controls the sound system, that would be a good place to start looking.

Your recording device must have inputs and outputs, otherwise you won't be able to monitor the input directly.
If a device doesn't have both inputs and outputs, you can create an "aggregate device" in the Audio MIDI Setup which is normally located in your applications/utilities folder. There is some info (Combining multiple audio devices to work as one device) in its help file and there's plenty of info on the web like the apple site.