Self-access and autonomous learning
Led by Marc Sheffner

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Leaders:
Marc Sheffner, British, has worked in Japan at high-school and college level since 1980. Now associate professor in the new English Department at Tezukayama University (Liberal Arts Faculty) in Nara, Japan. Started to get interested in computers about 4 or 5 years ago, and in independent learning shortly after that. Spent last year on sabbatical at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK observing the language centre there and at other institutions.

Short introductory statement: My presentation is on "Self-access and autonomous learning: Lessons from Britain". A large number of Higher Education Institutions in Britain have created separate language centres to supervise the teaching of both EFL and other foreign language classes (often referred to as Modern Foreign Languages or MFL). The majority of these language centres include a self-access section where students can pursue their studies on their own outside of class hours. How have language centres and self-access centres in Britain developed? How are they run? Will they also develop in Japan? What new directions, opportunities and challenges does this offer to language teachers?

My question is aimed at getting a picture of the state of things in Japan: how many of you are working in a "language centre", i.e. a separate organizational unit within a larger educational institution which supervises the teaching of languages? How many teachers are doing some kind of tutoring or advising which involves not just teaching but also assisting a students in learning on their own (whether in a language centre or not)?

Let me take this opportunity to plug the recently formed IATEFL Learner Independence Special Interest Group internet list. To join, send mail to Majordomo@mailserv.uni-giessen.de with the following command in the body of your email message:

subscribe li-sig "First name Last Name" <Your email address>

Mark Stone m.stone@iName.com is Coordinator of the Learner Independence SIG (Special Interest Group) at IATEFL - the International Association of  Teachers of English as a Foreign Language. He is a teacher and teacher-trainer based at St. Clare, Oxford. He is co-author of  The resourceful English teacher (English Teaching professional & DELTA publishing) has written articles for English Teaching professional and Independence.

Name: Elin Melchior

Comments

In my limited experience with self-access labs, I have found that they work best when students are required to use them. Is that the way most of the labs in Britain work?

Elin -- Komaki, Japan -- elin@gol.com

Name: Mark Stone

Comments

Hi Elin

Good question. I only have experience of a limited number of self-access centres (SACs) in the UK, but in my experience they work best if there is class time timetabled into the SAC.

In all the best schools that I have been to each teacher has at least one hour a week of class time programmed into the self-access centre. This is used both for induction to what is available, and also for guided self-access. Unless learners are familiar with what is available they generally tend not to use SACs to their fullest.

In my present college we have two hours a week timetabled in the SAC (out of 21 contact hours a week of English). One hour in the computer centre, and one hour in the language laboratory and self-study area. This seems to work well.

Name: Elin Melchior

Comments

SAC (Self-access centers) seems to be a very broad term. It could mean -

- students can study/work on anything at all

- students can choose from amongst a set of assignments

- students can work at their own pace

- students can choose when they work

Which of the above do you think are important/necessary charactistics for an SAC?

Elin - Komaki, Japan - elin@gol.com

Name: Marc Sheffner

Comments

SAC (Self-access centers) seems to be a very broad term. It could mean -

- students can study/work on anything at all

- students can choose from amongst a set of assignments

- students can work at their own pace

- students can choose when they work

Which of the above do you think are important/necessary charactistics for an SAC?

Elin - Komaki, Japan - elin@gol.com

All of the above, if you are talking about the physical place. People who have devoted some time to studying self-access and autonomy (I refer particularly to the PLAN, SMILE and CIEL projects in the UK), say that choice is the vital ingredient. SACS may be used for classes, and I would agree with Mark Stone that greater and more profitable use is made of SACs by students who have some classes there, or students whose teachers are knowledgeable and enthusiastic about self-access study. However, the key thing about a SAC is that users make their own choices about when, what and how to use the materials there. That is why such matters as clear labelling and catalogues, and instructions for using all the hardware, as well as guidance as to which materials are most suitable, are so important. It also explains Leslie Dickinson's pronouncement that "preparing learners to work in self-access should be viewed as preparing them to work autonomously." I.e. creating a SAC and guiding students to making the most of it should be viewed as an integral element in an overall policy to foster greater autonomy in students.

Some teachers refuse on principle to make self-access compulsory. Others take a different view (e.g. University of Lancashire and Humberside, UK, which requires all students to offer a portfolio of self-access study for assessment).

From my experience in Japan, I would say that just creating a SAC and advertising it is not enough. I would: introduce students in class to self-access materials and how to use them; create tasks which require students to use the SAC and produce something (a tape, a completed worksheet, a brief report, a presentation, etc) and assign some for homework; consider your students needs and wants, and make sure the SAC is stocked with materials that match them, and advertise those materials (bring some in to class, refer to them in class, post "new acquisitions" notices prominently, etc, make it a place students want to go to); students should be encouraged to use the SAC in pairs and groups as well as individually (learning is a social activity, not just a solo academic one); finally, the SAC must be (wo)manned and by people who are enthusiastic, helpful and knowledgeable, i.e. it should have a vibrant atmosphere.

Name: Marc Sheffner

Comments

As a follow-up to Elin Melchior's question (and my reply), visit the following website which is most relevant: <http://eltc.umist.ac.uk/webproj/webtrack/cfi_1.htm> being a site created for a COMP-SIG workshop last year on the topic of computers, SAC and autonomy.

Name: Bryn Holmes

Comments

I would like to invite my class to participate in this discussion.

We will have a self access lab here at NUCB in the library. It will be interesting to see what students' think about this.

Bryn

Name: D.Kaduhr

Comments

I've been using the TALK Learning System (TALK Random Access Materials for Random Access Learning) for the past 4 or 5 years now. I was originally sold on the system my first year when I discovered the students took to its learnewr-centered approach very enthusiastically. I followed completely the objective set out in the system, i.e., let the students alone and allow them to choose what TALK Tools they wanted to practice with,i.e., be responsible for what English they'll say & how much they'll say. That was a very exceptional group of students. The years after I've found that leaving students to do the practice on their own they will do as little as possible. And as for peer-evaluation - TALK says believe and trust in your students and they will do likewise - they gave their classmates perfect scores no matter how incoherent their speech was or no matter how little was spoken. I now take on a much more hands on approach. In Self-access learning what approach(es) do you take towards evaluation? My University expects a grade (& so do the students) at the end of the term. DK

Name: Marc Sheffner

Comments

Don Kadurh wrote: "In Self-access learning what approach(es) do you take towards evaluation? My University expects a grade (& so do the students) at the end of the term. " (You can find out more about the TALK system at <http://home1.alacarte.co.jp/~csi/>. There is a short answer and a long answer to this thorny question. The short answer is that your students are clearly not ready to take responsibility for evaluating themselves yet, as you have concluded. You just have to try various things to see what works. In your shoes I would a) make the evaluations myself and publicly, e.g. set aside 1 day for "happyo" (performance), give plenty of warning, and have everyone perform their piece on that day, 1 group at a time, in front of whole class; you could have all other groups evaluate with you, and write all the scores on the board, plus yours. b) focus on groups producing something to demonstrate what they've done, e.g. an audio tape of themselves doing a dialogue or a speech, or a tape diary, or written work. c) review what your purpose of the class is, and what their needs are: are they matched? If they don't really need to develop their English speaking skills, or if all that matters to them is getting the credits and if passing or failing your course is not tied in with their performances (including their ability/inability to evaluate themselves) in class, then chances are they will see those self-evaluation exercises as a waste of time. d) remind yourself and students of the purpose of developing independence/autonomy (e.g. to really make progress they are going to have to vastly increase their exposure to spoken English and do a lot more practising), and get them involved in thinking about it and its value.

The long answer is that self-access involves a lot of issues that all need consideration if it is going to work well. Leslie Dickinson (author of Self-instruction in Language Learning) wrote "preparing students to work in self-access should be viewed as preparing them to work autonomously." What is automous langauge learning and is it a Good Thing? Do my students need it? What is the incentive for them to work at this? The needs of the students (what they need English for, what kind of English they need, etc), should be assessed and reviewed often. What do other teachers in your institution do to support autonomy? How do other teachers evaluate? What incentives are there for students to evaluate themselves? What other opportunities (if any) do students have for self-access (in other subjects)? Finally, consider this: if you really want to guide students towards greater autonomy, you cannot force them into self-access - it has to be left as a choice they make. I don't say you have to agree with this, but you need to think about it and come down on one side of the fence or the other.

Name: Elin Melchior

Comments

This seems to tie back to goal setting. I feel that too often we set goals for our students when it would be far better for students to set their own goals. Not everybody wants to learn language for the same reasons. Even if compromise needs to be reached between the school, teacher, and students - an open acknowledgement (and hopefully discussion) of class goals seems to be very important. While this is important in any class, it becomes crucial with autonomous learning; however, when students have had no experience setting goals and thinking about how to achieve them . . . Well, choosing materials to meet a goal which hasn't been defined is very difficult.

Elin -- Komaki, Japan -- elin@gol.com

Name: Marc Sheffner

Comments

I agree with Elin that getting students to set their own goals is important to stimulate autonomy. In this age of "universal" university entrance (i.e. more than 50% of the student population) where there is a widening gap between teachers' knowledge and expertise and students' knowledge, skills and expectations, it may be an increasingly important strategy or teaching tactic. As Elin says, getting students to do this is when they are quite unfamiliar with the idea is a real challenge. How do you or would you set about it?

Name: Rex Hamilton-Turley

Comments

On the issue of 'forcing' self-direction in an institutional context - every context will have its own problems and its own solutions to them and, of course, where the institution can afford to offer modular teaching, the SALL can be just another entirely freely chosen option. But where 'one-class, one-teacher' is the norm then teachers are obliged to make decisions on behalf of their learners, and it seems to me that the principled decision to incorporate SALL sessions within a programme or course is no different from other pedagogical choices. In my own former environment of 4 hours daily contact in ELT in Ireland I found what I called mediated independent-dependent learning to work very well with most students (there were teacher-dependent exceptions). The integration of other-direction with self-direction, each feeding the other in a continuous mutuality, especially where the practice is 'normalised' (i.e. offered as a 'taken for granted' part of the learning/teaching milieu)can help to overcome qualms. But I think it is important, as a general rule, for each learner to determine what use to make of the SALL facility for himself or herself - there are other ways to encourage what I call dependent self-directed learning, in which the teacher or co-ordinator sets or supervises the self-directed learning agenda (especially for pairgroup work). I see self-access as a tool for learning and hence not as either for direction by the teacher or for direction by the learner but as a both/and to be used flexibly according to the situation and the perceived needs of the learner(s).

Name: Mark Stone

Comments

A response to various other writers comments below:

D Kaduhr said: "In Self-access learning what approach(es) do you take towards evaluation? My University expects a grade (& so do the students) at the end of the term."

In my college we award students who have taken the 'self-access' option in the afternoon a 'Certificate of Learner Independence.' I find this notion rather quaint, if not downright anomalous. The idea behind it seems to be that learners will only become 'autonomous' if they receive the appropriate piece of paper from the teaching institution! However, the certificate does seem to have some value to me in that it lists clearly what they have been working. Which means that they have to keep an organised record of their work, and by doing so are automatically reflecting on its value.

I feel slightly uneasy with the concept that the work in a self-access centre should itself be graded. It would seem to me more valuable to grade other work, which itself might have been prepared or worked on in a self-access centre. Not only traditional exams, but also research projects, class presentations and so on.

Elin Melchior said: "This seems to tie back to goal setting. I feel that too often we set goals for our students when it would be far better for students to set their own goals. Not everybody wants to learn language for the same reasons."

Presumably the first stage in helping learners to set their own goals is to get them to reflect on their own needs. Needs analysis questionnaires and discussions at the beginning of a course are vital to raise awareness of students individual reasons for learning. These can also highlight the differences between individual learners, and thus self-evidently justify the rationale for an individualised programme of self-study, alongside the traditional classroom-based language course.

Marc Sheffner said: "I agree with Elin that getting students to set their own goals is important to stimulate autonomy. In this age of "universal" university entrance (i.e. more than 50% of the student population) where there is a widening gap between teachers' knowledge and expertise and students' knowledge, skills and expectations, it may be an increasingly important strategy or teaching tactic. As Elin says, getting students to do this is when they are quite unfamiliar with the idea is a real challenge. How do you or would you set about it?"

As I observed above, a programme of needs analysis and reflection on learners' attitudes to studies is a pre-requisite for effective goal setting. Indeed this process of reflection needs to continue throughout a programme of self-study.

In my current teaching situation, with most learners coming from a relatively wide age span (generally aged 16-25), and certainly coming from very different backgrounds & cultures (I teach at an international school in the UK), it is particularly hard to introduce such programmes, because the groups of learners themselves are so heterogenous. Some have no problems with the concept of setting their own goals, others find the concept quite alien. However, within a monolingual context, presumably a gradual approach over a longer period of time is called for.

Name: Elin Melchior

Comments

How to get students to set their own goals?

--I think that the answer to this question is to begin slowly and work on it over time. I am very lucky in that an average student at my school has been with us for three years. We can do things with our students now that I cannot imagine doing three or four years ago. I can't begin to imagine how one would begin to solve this in a class which meets 90 minutes a week 24 times.

Name: Marc Sheffner

Comments

Re getting students to set their own goals, perhaps I could ask Elin how students set their own goals in his institution, what kind of goals are they, what advice (if any) is given, and what is the incentive to set the goal?

Name: Elin Melchior

Comments

Setting Goals - we started asking all students to fill out a "goals sheet" about four years ago. It asks the following questions "What are your goals for learning English?" (e.g. I need to speak English at work. I want to travel abroad and use English); "What are your objectives in English class?" (e.g. I want to improve my pronunciation. I want to learn to read faster.); and "What are your expectations for your English class and teacher?" (e.g. I expect to be given weekly quizzes. I want to use the computer.) I think the most important thing about these sheets is giving students the chance to revisit them, so that they can not only change them but also to remind them of what they previously thought imporant - a lot of them seemed very surprised by what they wrote the year before.

In project oriented classes, I've had students decide what they wanted to focus on (both subject and language wise) and then what project would reflect these choices. This type of goal setting seems to work well if you have a class in which you can actually sit down and talk with each group for an extended period of time.

I've set task checksheets for students and had them check things when they felt they had accomplished them - e.g. ask three questions during the group discussion - and then had them add a task or two of their own. After doing checksheets of this nature, I moved to more general questions like "feel comfortable asking questions in the past tense. Also I try to give students as many choices as possible. "Do you want to see the video segment again?", etc. I think giving students small choices and asking them to do the goal sheets enabled the project classes, which called for extensive thinking about goals, to succeed.

(Ms.) Elin Melchior - Komaki, Japan

Name: Anne Heller-Murphy

Comments

Self-Access and Autonomy I work at the Institute for Applied Language Studies at the University of Edinburgh, as Coordinator of the Self Access Centre. The Centre is used by both full-time EFL and part-time ML students. I will concentrate on EFL use, as presently ML students have neither timetabled or free access and so constitute at present only a small part of the SAC user population.

Our experience so far bears out much of what has been said in the discussion so far. Over time,as the Centre has grown, we have found it necessary to build in more and more support for both students and teachers using it. Lower-level students in particular found it a daunting place and tended to make limited use of it. Some teachers were uncertain of quite how to handle sessions held there.

At present, EFL students get a detailed induction into the use of the Centre which includes finding and discussing the materials they think might be most useful to them, completing a priorities/needs analysis worksheet and having hands-on experience of the computers, language lab and TVs (satellite and video playback). They then have a weekly 90min session in the Centre with the teacher responsible for their writing/listening skills development. Other teachers can book in for additional sessions if they wish. Students have free access outside class hours (the Centre is staffed by a teacher).

Teachers have a termly induction session on running SAC sessions, and updates on what is there. There are 'training packages' for them to use with their classes which aim to help students exploit more fully the reading and listening material we have, and the on-line catalogue is accessible not only in the students' lab and the study room but from all staff computers throughout the building. In-house classroom materials are being cross-referenced to videos, listening, reading and grammar materials held in the Centre.

Our problem now is monitoring the effectiveness of all of this in some concrete way. Feedback from students comes as part of the general course feedback they give on leaving. Past attemptsat getting on-going feedback in the SAC have failed. Anecdotal responses come from casual conversations with users, or from comments to academic advisors in tutorials. What we have observed is increasing numbers using the Centre, and more enthusiastic involvement of previously uneasy teachers. However, this is hard to quantify to myself and to report on to management, who in the end hold the purse-strings and make decisions about programme design. Before the present larger Centre was established nearly 5 years ago, we ran a small observation-based investigation of the running of the timetabled sessions (reported in "Edinburgh Working Papers in Applied Linguistics", Number 2, 1991); there is currently a project to attempt the measure the effect of the availability of the computerised catalogue on learners' use of the Centre (on hold till next academic year).

Has anyone any other ideas/solutions to this issue of monitoring?