Editorial

Abstract

As Guest Editor for this special issue of SiSAL, in which the themes are accessing and accessorising for self-access language learning (SALL), it gives me great pleasure to welcome readers, old and new, whether veterans in the field of SALL, or relative novices. While any journal editor is both facilitated and limited by the range and quality of submissions that are received for a special issue such as this one, my hope from the outset was to be able to bring together a collection in which the various strands and threads of knowledge and experience related to self-access which writers had to offer would weave together to create a web of fabric which would be varied and colourful and aesthetically pleasing and, at the same time, interesting and intellectually satisfying. My desire for an issue which would genuinely add to our knowledge of self-access, which would highlight some key but neglected SALL areas, and which would be suitably globally representative and geographically diverse in relation to SALL activity, may even have been surpassed. In the December 2012 issue of SiSAL Journal, edited by Heath Rose, in my featured article, I suggested that it was time to re-think the meaning of the term self-access and of how it is placed in relation to strategic learning and autonomy in language learning (Everhard, 2012). To this end, I talked about the many misconceptions that exist in relation to self-access language learning and offered a historically-based explanation as to why they have arisen. These misconceptions have to some extent been aided and abetted by the ‘mysteries’ which still surround autonomy and the practices which promote it, although, thankfully, we have the likes of Little (1997; 2013) who continues to further our understanding of autonomy and its relationship with self-access. Although cooperation, interdependence and relatedness are nowadays considered to be the key issues for autonomy, to be able to ‘nurture…its unfolding’ (Noels, 2009, p. 302), like Riley (1997, p. 116) and Little (1997, p. 36), I continue to insist that ‘access to self’ is the essential ingredient in the autonomy – self-access mix (Everhard, 2012, pp. 379-380) and this has been my guiding principle in the selecting and arranging of submissions.