How To Establish And Run Learners' Self-Access Facilities By Learning Journals

Self-access learning is commonly described as active, self-directed and independent learning. Self-access learning capabilities, which have been regarded as one of the most important educational objects in many countries since the 1990s, will not only help improve students' study achievements but also develop their life-long learning skills.First , the paper gives the background to self-access learning. Here a rough review of the history and present condition of the research on self-access learning is given. Then main elements that influence learners' attitudes towards self-access are described. Next, the paper makes a survey of the students' learning behavior both inside and outside their classroom and their study motivation and learning strategies. The subjects for the survey are the students from Anhui Institute of International Business. The statistical results from the descriptive statistics and qualitative analysis show that most of the students are lack of self-access learning facilities. Then, based on the theories of self-access learning and reflective teaching, the paper focuses on how to develop students' self-access capabilities by their journal-keeping experience. The students' attitudes towards learning journals and the parts their journals have played on developing their self-regulated abilities are surveyed and analyzed in the same way. The statistical results are as follows: 1) The students' attitude toward journal-keeping experience are generally positive; 2) They think keeping learning journals can be beneficial in the following aspects: to reflect their learning experience and to establish and run their self-access learning facilities; to know their own learning goals better and to take responsibility for their learning; to readjust and optimize their learning methods and strategies; to adapt themselves to new teaching methods and monitor and evaluate their own study behavior; to establish strong self-efficacy beliefs; to communicate with teachers better, etc. After analyzing the results, the paper further proposes several suggestions for instructing journal writing and some limitations are referred as well.