Communicative, cooperative language learning and use is important, but learners also need time to work on a variety of language skills (reading, listening, vocabulary, grammar) at appropriate levels with materials they find engaging. My involvement with self-access learning has evolved from large, multi-instructor systems, in which over a hundred students might be working on different skills in several different rooms, to a single teacher scheme in which classes of 20-30 students spend one of their two weekly class sessions in a self-access (incl. CALL) setting.
