Focusing on the future of SALL: A response to Stacey Vye

Katherine Thornton, Otemon Gakuin University

Abstract
This article is a response to Vye’s (2023) review of Everhard’s 2022 article in Relay Journal. I pick up on the themes that Vye identified in her review about the challenges facing the future of physical self-access learning centres, and relate Vye’s experiences in her context to my own at a different institution in the same country, Japan. I agree with Vye’s confidence that self-access language learning (SALL) will weather any coming storm, due to its adaptability and student-centred focus. I also see major advantages in the recent technological innovations accelerated by the pandemic, particularly in the way that familiarity with video-conferencing tools has encouraged the personal connections so important to SALL to be reimagined online, enhancing the quality of online learning and giving it a stronger focus on the development of learner autonomy. 

Keywords: self-access language learning, online learning, post-pandemic

This piece started life as a short comment on Stacey Vye’s recent paper in volume 6, issue 1 of Relay Journal (2023), in which she reviewed Carol Everhard’s (2022) article in the same journal. As I engaged with Vye’s thought-provoking words, and looked back over the original article, I found myself reflecting on my own experience of self-access language learning in Japan in the last decade or so. 

Before going into detail in my review, I must first acknowledge the complexity and danger of falling down a rabbit hole inherent in the task of responding to a review (Stacey Vye’s 2023 paper) of a response to Carol Everhard (2022), which is in itself a review of an article written by David Gardner and Lindsay Miller (2021), who themselves were reflecting on the way self-access language learning (SALL) has changed since they published their seminal book (Gardner & Miller, 1999).  If that reads as a very confusing sentence then it is representative of my own attempts to get my head round all the ideas referred to in the three different articles, as reviewing Vye’s piece has inevitably necessitated a careful reading of the other two papers. Therefore, to save the reader some of this confusion, I will attempt to restrict my review to my own reactions to the ideas raised in Vye’s paper, whether they are her own or her reactions to Everhard’s response (or maybe even to Gardner and Miller’s!). 

Firstly, I must confess that my own experience of SALL (currently 15 years and counting) is considerably less extensive than any of the above practitioners, but I believe I can say that I represent a new generation of passionate self-access advocates. I have worked almost exclusively in self-access (combined with some classroom experience) in that time, in two very different self-access learning centres (SALCs). In addition, my active role in the Japan Association for Self-Access Learning (JASAL; Thornton et al., 2021) since 2011 has afforded me the privilege of being able to visit and highlight many different SALCs, mostly in Japan but also overseas in New Zealand, the UK, and Ireland, and become familiar with many of the issues facing SALCs in Japan through our annual conferences and journal papers. 

Vye raises three main points in her review: the unfortunate trends in SALC closures, SALL innovations, and the role of SALL advising and affect. In this review, I will discuss what I feel SALL practitioners, including myself, need to do better in terms of highlighting the innovations and the role of affect in SALL to combat the danger of closures or downsizing threatening any more SALCs in the future. 

While I don’t often hear stories of actual SALC closures in my context of Japan, I have had firsthand experience of attempts by senior management to downsize or reduce services in existing facilities, so Vye’s account is familiar to me. Competition for both space and budget can be severe. In my own context, our SALC has been moved into a shared space used by other university groups and individual students not focused on language learning. This is due partly to a lack of space on campus, but a reduction in footfall over the pandemic certainly has not helped our cause. Providing services when students are available is an ongoing challenge, as the lunch “hour” (which was never a full hour), is now reduced to 30 minutes, and students have fewer and fewer free periods due to schedule changes and the pressure to take on part-time work for many. 

As Vye mentions, the often-quoted reason for this downsizing is something along the lines of “students have access to everything they could need to learn a language through their own devices, so why do they need a physical space?” I consider this to be a major misunderstanding and underestimation of the contribution that SALCs can make to a learner’s education, and an area where we, as advocates of SALL, need to find better ways of communicating these advantages. 

Firstly, it is now almost a truism to point out the importance of social connection in learning and student well-being. Recent studies into learning communities based in SALCs (Hooper, 2020; Murray & Fujishima, 2016; Mynard et al. 2020) have shown the positive effects of such social learning. Self-access environments help learners to set goals for future achievement by interacting with peers and near-peer role models (Murphey, 1998), sustain their motivation for learning languages, as shown by recent studies using self-determination theory to investigate the impact of various SALL activities (Mynard & Shelton-Strong, 2022; Watkins, 2022). 

Vye and Everhard are right to highlight the growing understanding of the importance of advising and the role of affect, not only in the development of learner autonomy but also in general student well-being, something which self-determination theory is also focused on. 

In interviews with me for a recent book chapter (Thornton, 2020), Marina Mozzon-McPherson, who played a pivotal role in the self-access movement in the UK in the 1990s and 2000s, gave her thoughts on the potential for advising to move beyond self-access, to be able to make a valuable contribution to student well-being. In high-pressured university environments with increasing dropout rates, SALL practitioners could, and one could argue already are, making the case for the importance of advising beyond language learning.

Additionally, (and this is touched upon in Everhard’s review) we need to devote more energy into studies which can highlight the tremendous range of skills that students can gain if they take on staff or supervisory roles in a self-access centre, including event management, administrative, organizational, and communication skills (Kanduboda, 2020; Watkins, 2021). Not only SALC users but also SALC student staff and volunteers benefit hugely from their involvement in SALL. 

Finally, and this may be the one argument that is cutting through and keeping many Japanese SALCs in a healthier state than others around the world, is the ongoing need to provide supportive spaces for target language interactions. In primarily EFL environments, where opportunities to use the language on a daily basis are lacking, many institutions still recognize the pivotal role SALCs can play in supporting students linguistic and sociolinguistic communicative competence.　

To finish, I’d now like to give my own take on the other issues Vye highlights: SALL innovations, the complicated role of technology and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. While it was undoubtedly an existential threat to physical SALC spaces and may have resulted in some downsizing or even closure, on reflecting on the role of the pandemic on my own facilities and services, I see several upsides that I am now starting to comprehend more fully. The first one is the renewed appreciation of face-to-face interaction and the understanding that creativity and well-being benefit when people come together in physical spaces. Whether this is enough to stem the tide of downsizing remains to be seen, but it is a powerful argument that has cut through to the general public. 

The other main advantage I see is the fusion of technology and personal interaction facilitated by the spread of video-conferencing such as Zoom during lockdowns. Until 2020, technology in language learning was largely restricted to online e-learning materials (that Gardner and Miller [2021] understandably criticize for all too often mimicking old-fashioned grammar exercises failing to support autonomous practices) or as a tool to access content in any language being learned, through YouTube or streaming, online blogs, newspapers for example. Gardner and Miller (2021) are right to point out the challenge this can represent in helping students to select appropriate resources and use them effectively. However, thanks to the increasing popularity of Zoom and the like, the personal element which self-access does so well has now been firmly embedded in online self-access learning. Students can have advising and conversation sessions from their homes, meet fellow students, take part in teletandem exchanges with people from other countries, and even join student conferences such as the ones run by JASAL. If we cannot bring every learner back into the physical space of a SALC, thanks to the familiarity of these tools, now we can at least bring some of those personal and interactional elements of the SALC to them. 

I’d like to thank the authors of all the Relay Journal articles highlighted in this review (Vye, Everhard, and Gardner & Miller), for their reflections which have in turn facilitated my own. SALL undoubtedly faces challenges in the future but thanks to the vibrant community of researchers and practitioners involved, I am confident we can weather any storms to come. 

Notes on the contributor

Katherine Thornton has an MA in TESOL from the University of Leeds, UK, and is associate professor at Otemon Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan where she works as a learning advisor. She is the director of E-CO (English Café at Otemon), the university’s self-access center, and current president of the Japan Association of Self-Access Learning (JASAL). Her research focuses on multilingualism in self-access environments, and second language identities.

References

Everhard, C. J. (2022). There’s something about SALL: A response to Gardner and Miller. Relay Journal, 5(1), 19-30. https://doi.org/10.37237/relay/050103 

Gardner, D., & Miller, L. (1999). Establishing self-access: From theory to practice. Cambridge University Press. 

Gardner, D., & Miller, L. (2021). After “Establishing…”: Self-Access Learning then, now and into the future. Relay Journal, 4(2), 55-65. https://doi.org/10.37237/relay/040202

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Thornton, K., Taylor, C., Tweed, A. D., & Yamashita, H. (2021). JASAL and the self-access learning center movement in Japan. In A. Kramer & E. Lavolette (Eds.), Language center handbook 2021 (pp. 31-59). International Association for Language Learning Technology. 

Vye, S. (2023). There is something about affirming SALL: An Everhard and Gardner and Miller review. Relay Journal, 6(1), 95-101.  https://doi.org/10.37237/relay/060107

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