Giving Speaking Practice in Self-Access Mode a Chance

• Main Author: Kerstin Dofs
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Kanda University of International Studies 2012-12-01
• Series: Studies in Self-Access Learning Journal
• Subjects: speaking practice; support; autonomous learning activities; autonomous performance; task design
• Online Access: http://sisaljournal.org/archives/dec13/dofs

Finding resources and activities which will interest students and promote speaking in a self-access resource can be challenging. This article describes how the School of English at Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology (CPIT), Christchurch, New Zealand, works to enable speaking practice in their Language Self Access Centre (LSAC). The activities which students are encouraged to do were produced consequent to research and an examination of good practice world- wide within the field of autonomy in language learning. The article will explore some basic design principles and conditions which were followed with the aim of creating maximal “comprehensible outputs” for speaking (Anderson, Maclean & Lynch, 2004), and, at the same time, creating conditions for these speaking tasks which would optimise development of autonomous language use (Thornbury, 2005). This is followed by an analysis of how the resources provided in a designated speaking area in the LSAC fulfil these principles and conditions, and how they may foster autonomous learning.