Fostering English-Use in a SALC through a Discussion-Based Classroom Intervention

Self-access learning centres (SALCs) are spaces in which learners are provided with access to resources that can assist them in achieving their goals. Within the SALC at Kanda University of International Studies, there is a wide range of resources available to students. However, a prior in-house study (Yarwood, Lorentzen, Wallingford, & Wongsarnpigoon, 2019) indicated that the resources were not being fully utilised by the students. The aim of our intervention study was to explore how targeted discussion topics could be used in classroom settings to assist non-English major students in feeling supported in their autonomous use of English within the SALC context. Data were collected in the form of a post-intervention survey, and focus group interviews. The data were then analysed using Basic Psychological Needs Theory (BPNT), a sub-theory within Self-Determination Theory (Ryan & Deci, 1987). Our findings suggest that the intervention fostered feelings of competence in both students’ English abilities, and their ability for selfreflection. Feelings of competence combined with support from peers motivated a portion of students to increase their use of English within the SALC. While many students felt that the intervention had helped them to increase their use of English in the SALC, the majority of students were uncertain about the effectiveness of the intervention. We will present several possible reasons for these findings.

In recent years, the SALC at KUIS has begun to explore the possibilities offered by Self-Determination Theory (SDT) (Deci & Ryan, 1987) to better understand how we are supporting the autonomy of our language learners. In 2018, research was conducted using Basic Psychological Needs Theory (BPNT), a sub-theory within SDT, to get a better understanding about our students' views on whether the SALC was successfully creating an autonomysupportive environment that fostered English-language use (Asta & Mynard, 2018;Yarwood, Lorentzen, Wallingford, & Wongsarnpigoon, 2019). One finding from this research was that students felt that changes in their autonomous use of English in the SALC needed to come from within themselves. For example, "When I go to the SALC, I get passive posture and I want [to be] more active" (Yarwood et al., 2019, p. 244). Comments like these suggest that language learners are aware of their capacity for autonomy, but for unspecified reasons struggle to behave in accordance with their desires. Given that self-access learning contexts require learners to volitionally engage with the resources available, it was determined that the development of interventions may be beneficial in supporting learner autonomy. However, since attendance in the SALC is not mandated, issues of reach became apparent when brainstorming possible interventions. To ameliorate this issue, the first author, a member of the SALC staff, contacted members of the English Language Institute (ELI) to collaborate on a classroom-based intervention. The purpose of which was to support students' use of English in the SALC through autonomy-supportive, awareness-raising discussions in the classroom.
In the first part of the paper we outline our rationale for choosing a classroomintervention, as well as the theoretical framework used. In the second part of the paper we provide the methodology and details of the intervention, while the third section highlights our three main findings. We conclude by calling for more teachers to investigate how classrooms can become autonomy-supportive environments that foster self-awareness and encourage the use of self-access resources.

The interactive relationship between the SALC, ELI and students
Our SALC building is a large, two-story, open-plan complex designed to offer staff and students a range of learning environments from individual study spaces, conversation lounges; otherwise known as Yellow sofas, and ICT-equipped classrooms. These classrooms act as bases for many of the ELI's compulsory and elective English courses, while many of the SALC's physical spaces are utilised for classroom presentations and the conversation and academic support services provided by the ELI (For more information see Burke, et al., 2018). SALC staff members, or Learning Advisors (LAs), offer support to students through advising sessions in which intentional dialogue is used to encourage learners to reflect, and take charge of their learning (Kato & Mynard, 2016). It is also the role of LAs to support ELI teachers through SALC-orientations and classroom workshops on aspects of self-directed language learning. From these interactions, students become familiar with the LA assigned to their classes, and this can encourage them to book advising sessions. As such, there is a highly interactive relationship between the SALC, the ELI, and the students.
Our intervention aimed to utilise these existing relationships in order to help students create stronger links between the classroom and the resources available outside the classroom.
As mentioned, use of the SALC is not mandated, however, all students do pass through the building for their English classes. We felt that if students were given opportunities to discuss their learning then they might develop greater awareness of their needs, and how the SALC might support those needs, while simultaneously being encouraged by their peers.

Basic psychological needs theory
The aims of our intervention aligned with the concept central to the SDT approach. That is, that the satisfaction of basic needs is a necessary condition for optimal development and wellbeing (Ryan & Deci, 2017). While researchers have suggested the inclusion of other basic psychological needs such as meaning and self-esteem (Andersen, Chen, & Carter, 2000;Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon, 2000), the need for competence, relatedness and autonomy stand steadfast at the heart of BPNT (Ryan & Brown, 2003). In the interest of clarity, a brief explanation will be provided for each of these needs.
Competence is the sense an individual has of being capable. It is suggested that individuals need to engage in challenges so that they may develop the skills required for mastery, and therefore able to experience feelings of effectance (Deci & Ryan, 2000;Ryan & Deci, 2017).
Competence may be exemplified in an individual's curiosity and wonder. For example, when language learners question the connotations of words to get a sense of their nuance.
Relatedness deals with the feeling of being connected to others in your community (Ryan & Deci, 2008). In a language learning context, this may include teachers, learning advisors, classmates, or exchange students. It may even include those on the periphery of the formal educational experience such as parents, friends, and potential employers, since each of these individuals can affect the feeling of connection and belonging learners desire.
Autonomy in SDT is similar to the definitions already presented. The need to selfregulate experiences and actions (Ryan & Deci, 2017), is central and so too is the sense of volition. A key difference lies in the view that not all intentional actions are truly self-regulated or autonomous, but rather may be regulated by external or internal pressures (Ryan & Deci, 2017). Autonomy is thus when an individual acts in a manner that is fully-informed, selfendorsed, and congruent with their internal values and interests.

Awareness and needs satisfaction
Needs satisfaction according to Ryan and Deci (2017) is facilitated by autonomy support.
Autonomy support in SDT literature is framed as a responsiveness to the perspectives and concerns of individuals within our care, meaning we as LAs and ELI teachers should be providing our students with opportunities to share and discuss their experiences as language learners, as well as their fears and concerns. It also suggests that we should be providing opportunities for reflection so individuals can gain greater awareness of their internal and external desires. This awareness then acts as a foundation for autonomous learning behaviours that are consistent with individuals' values and basic needs. Furthermore, individuals who lack the ability to self-reflect and self-organise have been shown to have a lower capacity for autonomously regulating their behaviours than those who have gained insights from selfreflection (Deci & Ryan, 2000, Ryan & Deci, 2017.
Awareness does not occur in a vacuum. Within our SALC/ELI context, interactions between teachers and students, or student to student interactions are considered spaces for awareness to grow and develop.

The intervention
It is common practice for many English classrooms to start their lessons with warm-up conversations. By adapting the warm-up conversation activity to suit the aims of this study, we were able to find a place for raising awareness without adding to teacher preparation time. When deciding the contents of the discussion prompts, we referred to advising notes kept by the first author. These notes were compiled over the course of the previous academic year and detailed issues KUIS students commonly discussed regarding their language learning and use. From these notes we generated 28 discussion prompts and selected 14 to use in the intervention (Appendix A). Of these 14 prompts, five were related specifically to the SALC, three related to classroom situations, five were applicable to both the SALC and classroom environments, while one focused on the desire to study overseas. We anticipated that the prompts would elicit active peerto-peer discussions since the situations described were ones familiar to KUIS students.
Additionally, we made a deliberate decision to not limit the prompts to the SALC. Not all students use the SALC, so we did not want to limit students' ability to participate in the discussions. To further support the students' output, scaffolding in the form of information questions was provided, as can be seen in Figure 1. Over the course of the six-week intervention, we divided each participating class into groups of three to five students to discuss a prompt for 10 minutes. Following this group discussion, we held a five-minute class debrief in which the teacher asked the groups to summarise their discussion and share it with the class. Due to classroom language policies, discussions were conducted in English, with Japanese permitted only for clarification purposes.
Students were encouraged to share their own personal stories, and ask questions of each other.

Participants
Our participants were non-English major students enrolled in the first-year compulsory English classes taught by the second and third authors. They received an explanation of the research before being invited to volunteer their consent at the beginning of the semester. Upon completing the post-intervention survey, our participants were invited to join in focus group discussions with others from their class. While we had fourteen students volunteer, only nine students attended the focus group interviews. Table 1 below provides the details of those participants.

Survey
We used a survey to gather data about student use of English in the SALC after the intervention. Participants had the option to respond to an open-ended item if they stated the intervention had increased their use of English in the SALC. This item was designed to collect further data regarding student perceptions of how the intervention had increased their use of English. All survey items were written in English and Japanese, with Japanese translations being verified by a bilingual speaker.
Responses from the open-ended survey item were assigned descriptive codes (Saldaña, 2015) in Excel and analysed in line with the BPNT framework. We worked in pairs to establish descriptions of the codes that were generated until agreement was reached. The agreed upon codes were then used during a second round of analysis.

Focus group interviews
Chosen for their economical method of data collection and adaptability in terms of structure (Dörnyei, 2007), we conducted parallel focus groups with students from each of the participating classes. The decision to allow the participants to act as their own facilitators during the focus group interviews derived from a tendency for lower tier students to focus on the ELI teacher or LA when responding. To mitigate this issue, we printed the interview questions (Appendix C) on A4 size paper and placed them in the centre of the table used during the session. Each question was written in Japanese and English to support students' understanding.
As with the survey translations, these were also checked by a bilingual staff member.
Participants were instructed to discuss each of the questions for as long as they liked using English as much as possible. Japanese was permitted, but interpretations by the speaker's classmates were requested to assist with data collection. If necessary, we were on standby to assist with facilitation, but otherwise did not participate in the discussions.
We transcribed audio data collected from the focus groups and Japanese translations were checked by a bilingual speaker. We analysed relevant sections of the transcriptions in an Excel document. Codes used for the focus group data followed the same explorative process as the open-response survey items mentioned previously.

Analysis and Discussion
According to the 89 survey responses ( Figure 2) collected upon the conclusion of the intervention, 39 students stated that they had begun to use more English in the SALC since participating in the targeted discussion activity.  These comments provide some evidence to suggest that fear of mistakes and perceived lack of English ability may contribute to low confidence, and thereby prevent learners from seeking opportunities to support their own feelings of competence. In the case of Kenichi and Mana, both imply that their confidence was lower prior to the discussion, adding support for the effectiveness of the intervention in terms of supporting the students' need for competence.
In comparison, a smaller number of students (nine), felt that their English use in the SALC had not changed with one student from the open-ended survey stating unequivocally: ディスカッションに参加しても SALC で英語を使うとは限らないから。

[Joining the discussion doesn't mean you'll use English in the SALC]
While some students in the survey may have felt the discussion activity had no effect on their English use in the SALC, there was a lack of certainty among the majority of the students (41 students). The discussions may have supported the students' need to feel competent by increasing their confidence as mentioned earlier, however, as the extract above suggests, supporting competence in the classroom does not necessarily translate into feeling confident and competent enough to engage with a less structured self-access context.
From these results, we suggest that this classroom intervention has the potential to support some students' English use in the SALC. The intervention also appears to have the potential to facilitate students' English use in environments other than a SALC; a finding that will be explored in later sections. The subsequent sections will explore in what ways the discussion activity was autonomy-supportive and how this autonomy-support lead to increased English use in the SALC.

Competence and relatedness
As the data have suggested, students' feelings of competence appeared to be a central concern during the discussions. During the focus groups, when asked which of the discussion prompts were most memorable, five of the nine participants selected the prompt connected to the 'yellow sofa' (Figure 1 above), a lounge area where students are able to sit and chat with ELI teachers, international students or other KUIS students. Interacting on these sofas is considered desirable but difficult for many students due to various affective factors, including issues of confidence or social dynamics (Burke et al., 2018 While the exact role of the discussion prompt in precipitating the action is unclear, Miyako's comment does show that the support of peers may encourage learners to take proactive steps to join communities. This may be especially important when membership to an individual's desired community first requires the intimidating perception of that community to be modified or completely nullified.
While the desire to gain membership to a community that represents a degree of competence was visible within the data, other instances of relatedness need satisfaction were also found. In particular, the role of peers in creating a community of learners who support each other to identify strengths, weaknesses and provide encouragement for proactive learning behaviours.
When the focus group interviewees were asked to explain the importance of their classmates' belief in their abilities, 'relatedness' appeared in a quarter of the coded responses. These responses illuminated students' desires to be part of the learning community as a supporter or role model to their classmates: This form of awareness-raising whereby peers identify the strengths and weaknesses of their classmates in a supportive manner to encourage personal growth highlights the benefits of discussion-based interventions such as ours in promoting feelings of competence and relatedness.

Supporting autonomy
The data highlights the importance of relatedness and autonomy, with the students feeling that they have a support network and community in which they can share their experiences and concerns. The data positively show that during the discussions, the students acted autonomously through their increasing self-awareness and ability to identify the skills that they had, the actions they had taken, and the actions they felt they needed to take in order to continue to develop and grow as learners. We believe that this led to an opportunity for reflection as it may have assisted the students in developing their level of awareness and control as a learner, which appears to have led to some action. Examples of this were recorded during the focus group interviews, where students shared the impact of the discussions, and any changes they had identified, with regards to the way that they learned or used English in the SALC: Before this discussion, I decide to use LPP or academic support area once a week and The discussions appeared to have provided the students with the chance to develop their learning communities and strengthen their support network within each class, which for some students appears to have been an important motivating factor. The example from the focus group below shows the effect that this had on desire and we can almost see the student have a moment of self-realisation as they clarify the steps they want to take to develop their competence: After the discussion, I think everyone '仲良くなる' [get along], get along with... ["each other" provided by teacher] Yes. And I think I want to use more English and speaking

English. (Mana)
This same student later identifies skill areas that she feels are lacking and we see her take the first steps toward action. As discussed in the section on awareness and needs satisfaction, SDT has shown us that awareness can help build a foundation for autonomous learning behaviour, which we can see in the example from the focus group interviews below: Interestingly, while one student thought that there had been no change to how they learned or used English, their comment demonstrates the benefit that affirmation can have when learners share their thoughts and opinions. It appears that when students share their experiences and they are similar to the experiences of their peers it gives them reassurance. We believe that this can, in turn, support the autonomous decisions they make. In the example below from the focus group interviews, Yumi has noticed that she had the same opinions as her peers, so while it did not have any influence on change, it did appear to act as a reassurance: I think no. I think because we have almost the same opinions so... So kind of just make sure. (Yumi) King (2013) showed that students can be self-conscious about how they appear in front of their peers and the need to feel at one with the group, which can have an effect on their desire to act. This was also recorded in a study conducted by Humphries, Burns, and Tanaka (2015), where a student explained how a noticed difference in level with her peers made her feel negative emotions as shown in the quote, "when I was better than the other students, I felt that I was isolated and felt guilty from showing officials my English" (p.171). Such feelings impact on students' willingness to use English in a classroom setting, interact publicly (outside of the classroom) in English, and their desire to improve, which further illustrates the importance of Yumi's comment on what she noticed from the discussions.
The intervention appears to demonstrate the importance that affirmation can have on students' autonomy and in supporting the autonomous decisions that they make. The discussions provided the students with the opportunity to understand that their actions and desires were often shared by their peers -facts which previously appeared to have been unknown. We believe that this supported students in developing greater autonomy as it provided them with reassurance.
While the students were not able to fully actualise their desired learning behaviours, the support of their peers allowed them to start the self-reflective process and take their first steps. In Overall there is evidence that students feel supported and have a sense of community which positively motivated them to begin the self-reflective process. For students like Ayaka and Kenichi this led to an autonomous decision to take action, while for other students like Mana it helped her to identify skill areas that she felt she was lacking in, and consider the first steps toward action. It was clear that the discussions had a positive influence on some students as it helped them to become more self-aware and supported them in exhibiting autonomous learning behaviour. Even with the students like Yumi, who stated that there was no change, it showed that their personal decisions regarding their current trajectories were validated by the community of their peers. This demonstrates the importance of support and affirmation when we look at learners and their autonomy.

English use elsewhere
While the data seem to show the discussion activity had many positive impacts on student experience, namely by creating a sense of community, increasing awareness, and increasing confidence, as mentioned in earlier sections, some of the data suggest that the activity did not necessarily lead to an increased use of English in the SALC. Some participants suggested that their use of English had increased in class or in other unspecified contexts. I sometimes discusses these kinds of these topics in Japanese. So I know the opinion in Japanese. So yes, I don't change the thinking. But time of using English is increase. (Ryusuke) We will discuss in English in the class. And after I suddenly, I began to speak English even when it is out of the class. (Himiko) These types of responses may indicate that participants felt an increased awareness of their own competence, so their use of English increased in various contexts outside of the SALC.
While one participant mentioned using English at home, the others did not indicate in which contexts their English use had increased. Participants have various opportunities to use English outside of the SALC, for instance, through exchanges with language partners and in their classes, so it is possible their increase in English use takes place within such contexts.

Conclusion
Our aim in this study was to explore how targeted discussion topics could be used in classroom settings to assist non-English major students in feeling supported in their autonomous use of English in the SALC. From the findings, we feel that there is evidence to support the notion that having students discuss issues related to their language learning among their peers, can support their need for autonomy, relatedness, and competence. In particular, there is evidence to suggest that through the discussions students develop peer communities that promote self-awareness, and foster feelings of competence -not only in their speaking abilities but in their reflective abilities, which work together to encourage English use in the SALC.
While the primary target was to increase English use in the SALC, there was evidence to suggest that the autonomy-supportive nature of the intervention may not have been sufficient. Discussions provided opportunities for increasing self-awareness, but they were limited in terms of time and scaffolding. Learners lacking in the skills to translate desire into action may require more time and assistance to autonomously regulate their behaviours. Future interventions studies may benefit from eliciting student responses as to what measures they feel would help them to take the next steps. Alternatively, students may have developed the self-awareness and autonomous regulatory behaviour we aimed to support, however, it may have led to increased English use outside the SALC, rather than within it. Data showed that the intervention appeared to reaffirm students' current learning methods, however, if these learning methods did not already include SALC usage then it is natural for the students to continue not making use of SALC resources.
The relationship between the SALC and the ELI at KUIS may be unique, however, interventions such as this one offer an insight into possible mutual benefits. If classroom spaces can become autonomy-supportive environments for reflection on language learning, while simultaneously making connections to self-access resources, then more students may feel confident and motivated enough to proactively seek opportunities to use English in these contexts. Likewise, the more students engage with SALC resources, the more they may gain confidence and maintain motivation for their classroom studies. It is our hope that more intervention studies explore the possibilities for a symbiotic relationship between university classrooms and self-access centres. In particular, we encourage teachers to conduct action research within their language classrooms and experiment with different forms of discussions to identify what scaffolds are needed to help students feel supported and capable of enacting their chosen language learning methods. In universities where self-access learning spaces and materials are present, longitudinal studies with a small group could be used to gain further insight into how in-class discussions can lead to greater self-awareness and action. Language learning is no easy feat but by giving our students opportunities to become self-aware in autonomy-supportive environments while simultaneously highlighting the resources available to them, we can hopefully make their journey a little easier.

Notes on the Contributors
Amelia Yarwood is a Learning Advisor at Kanda University of International Studies. She has worked in education in both Australia and Japan. Her research interests include L2 identity and motivation, emotions in language learning, language learner autonomy, and curriculum design.
Crystal Rose-Wainstock is an English Lecturer at Kanda University of International Studies. She has been in the field of ELT for about 11 years with experience in South Korea, the United States, and Japan. Her research interests include educational technology, computer-assisted language learning, learner autonomy, and language assessment.
Michelle Lees is an English Lecturer at Kanda University of International Studies. Her research interests include computer-based language learning and how it may be utilised to help governments achieve their long-term language goals within schools, government policy in language education, and socio-cultural factors that affect SLA.

3.
Did talking with your classmates during the discussion activity change the way you actually learned or used English in class or in the SALC?

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