A practical proposal : the self-access approach.

Coping with diversity is one of the most difficult challenges to face for teachers nowadays. In a way, every foreign language group of students is a mixed ability one. The pupils in any of them come from different social and familiar backgrounds, they have all different learning styles, they show different attitudes towards foreign languages, they don´t have the same interests and they don´t have the same levels. The idea of a uniform group is a myth and self-acces centres are a way of coping with mixed-ability classes that shows different positive aspects.

Some of the reasons provided by Tice (The Mixed Ability Class. Richmond Publishing, 2005) to consider the possibilities of the self-access approach, connected with the Humanistic approaches, are:

- 'It catters for a wide mix of ability.

- Teaching can be tailored to individual's needs.

- Learners work on something that they think is useful and interesting.

- It increases learner autonomy and gives students a sense of responsibility for their own learning.

- You can spend more time with those students who need your help.

- It adds variety to your classes.'

There are more reasons quite practical: self-access materials allow students to do maximize their learning by doing extra work on their own to develop their skills, revising different aspects of their work, undertaking remedial work when it is necessary or advancing in their learning when they are motivated to do so.

The more in control we are of the learning process, the better we'll probably learn. That is why all the reasons previously stated are enough to make us reflect about the advantages of using self-access centres when teaching-learning a foreign language. But ... what are self access centres?

What self-access centres are

Rodden defines them as 'a physical entity' and adds 'It might be a classroom cupboard with a set of dog-eared learner dictionaries and a pile of supplementary exercises, or it might be an all-singing, all-dancing, multimedia learning centre with state of the art learning resources and a team of language counsellors to guide individual student development.' That is, a self-access centre is a collection of materials ready to be used by pupils individually or in pairs or groups, preferably very motivating, sequenced according to different criteria such as topics, skills or linguistic difficulty, including activities from all skill areas as well as vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation, and including the possibility for students to get a feed-back when using them.

A self-access centre can be something more or less sophisticated depending on our resources. A look at any of the publishers' catalogues can give us an idea of the huge amount of ELT material available nowadays some of it specifically directed at self-study or ready to be adapted for self-study use. It will depend on the amount of money available, the time you are ready to invest and how interest you are to keep it going. Ideally, we could include lots of resources: art supplies with ideas to use them, students' workbooks and grammar books with accompanying keys, graded readers together with tapes or CDs for a range of reading levels, video cassettes or CDs with worksheets or a tasks, magazines, comics, games, computer software programs to choose from, etc.

It could be good for teachers to have their own rooms or facilities to set up self-access corners. Probably most of the work will take place in the classroom, and a reorganisation of the space and furniture will probably be necessary provided a traditional one doesn´t suit this approach. The creation of corners associated with different tasks or skills could be an idea to be considered. The school library offers an excellent opportunity to create sections to work using this approach. Specific furniture, for example trolleys that can be easily moved, would ideally be necessary too. But all this is not absolutly necessary. Most of us know from experience how useful a box of materials travelling with us can be.

Apart from space and resources, some more elements are necessary: a change in the teacher's role, in the pupil's role and in the institution provided the aim is to help our pupils to be more independent, more autonomous, more capable of making decisions about the development of their own learning. The idea is to place the learner at the very centre of the whole process. That's why teachers and pupils will probably need some training before trying a self-access learning environment.

The teacher's work should consist of providing materials and learning opportunities, offering counselling and assessment services and arranging everything so that learners need minimal, if any, assistance from the teacher. Clear explanations about the whole range of materials to be used, directions about the way to use them and the way to evaluate their production without teacher intervention must be given to pupils. This is the way to help them to help themselves to learn the language.

The pupils have to learn the way to plan what they want to learn, how they can do it and when. And they may find quite hard to organise thier own learning process at first. Of course thye must develop to cooperate with the ret of thier classmates. Besides, they must develop a much more responsible attitude towards their own learning. They must also learn to evaluate/asses their own progress and to motivate themselves to keep on learning. It is not easy.

Institutions have to change a lot to create a self-acces friendly environment too.

Using self-access centres is, of course something that needs a period of adaptation. At first teachers can resist t the change considering it is their responsibility to ensure that learning takes place and students may resist thinking that it is the thei teacher's responsibility if they learn or not. More support is needed during the early stages of the process so that learners learn about the correct procedures to be used. And we can´t forget the importance of encouraging learners to keep individual records of their self-access work. But when the routine has been set up, the regular use of self-access materials can foster a relaxed environment where learners decide how and when to interact with the different resources, with their classmates, with their teacher, and with the foreign language.

Gardner and Miller's 'Establishing Self-Access' (C.U.P., 1999) is the key book to be consulted when thinking about the possibility to implement all this in your lessons.

I.C.T. and self-access centres

I.C.T. play a decisive role in our society and culture. Their widely accepted use has brought to us critical changes to educational institutions. Technology in itself is not the answer to the educational problems we have to face in our context but there are multiple reasons to support the use of I.C.T. in the classroom:

- They give us the possibility to access a huge amount of information, offering updated information of the real world which means a world-based curriculum' and much more motivated pupils.

- Their use imply the access to different cultural realities and the development of open-minded attitude towards diversity.

-They can also help us to solve some of the problems schools have been facing recently such as the existence of mixed ability groups.

- They are an excellent tool to keep on learning throughout our lives providing us with new teaching-learning models based on distance or open learning.

- They provide for us to promote autonomous learning through the creation of self access centres. Computers can help a lot in this field. Teachers cand find/create lots of materials suitable for autonomous learning classified and graded according to the criteria they choose and it means an excellent opportunity to make the most of each pupil in a mixed ability group. Different groups of pupils can work simultaneously using different types of materials on different topics at different levels, usually motivating for them and ready to be worked in an autonomous way thanks to all the interactivity they create: pupil-pupil, pupil-teacher and pupil computer.

Pérez Torres (2002 : 56-60) analysed the different educational possibilities I.C.T provide us dividing them in five different groups: word processors, web based activities, electronic dictionaries, multimedia programmes and authoring programmes. We think that presentation programmes such as Power Point or the use of e-mails and chats are a very useful resource not to be forgotten. If you want to see some examples of the possibilities I.C.T. provide us, click on this LINK. These activities to work the topic 'the space' are an example of the CLIL approach (Content and Language Integrated Learning) based on the use of I.C. T.

We know that using I.C.T. all the time is not possible. Tres and Turrón (2003 : 251) refer to the possibility to combine them with more traditional activities as ‘blended-learning'. But we highly recommend their use, specially when thinking about self-access materials. If you want to see an excellent example of graded and sequenced self-access materials on the web created by Isabel Pérez, click on this LINK.

All these programmes and resources can be used to teach, to transmit knowledge in a more efficient way, but they can offer us many more possibilities. I.C.T. is nothing but a way to access information and in educational contexts it can be used from a more behaviourist or a more constructivist point of view.

A behaviourist use of computers can be very useful in the classroom. There is very interesting and motivating educational software available that include the use of images, sound and interactivity and that give us the opportunity to work with mixed ability groups. The only problem this kind of resources is that they imply a mechanical use of computers and they have a short term educational utility.

A constructivist use of computers has longer-term educational usefulness because they allow children to practise interesting procedures (reflection on the ways to learn, communicative practice based on authentic language and updated materials or cooperative work) and to develop different attitudes they will have to put into practise in the future. It includes the use of topic hot-list, multimedia scrapbook, treasure hunt, subject sampler and web-quest.

Choosing the approach for our lessons is an important decision. We can decide to use text books or not. The second option is not so complicated nowadays thanks to computers. Now we have a wonderful chance to be much more autonomous teachers and to organise much more autonomous learning processes for pupils based on the use of self-access materials or even self-access centres.