In Japan, there are a number of self-access centres which, through hard work, collaboration and support, have succeeded in establishing unique identities for themselves. However, as encouraging as this is, there are still university-based self-access centres within the country where the opposite is true. In this article, one self-access centre’s struggle to form a unique identity for itself will be examined. Discussion will first focus on understanding the history of the centre and underlying reasons for why this problem persists. Thereafter, attention will be turned to ambitious efforts being made to deal with the issue in light of long-standing limitations imposed by the university’s administration.

Although mandatory regular use of self-access centres is surprisingly common, this goes against the purpose of them to foster autonomous learning. However, some students never consider using such resources without being pushed to do so. In order to create an opportunity to discover a self-access station (SAS) at one Japanese university, a single assignment was designed and implemented requiring students to visit the SAS in order to answer questions related to its use and facilities. Thereafter, an end-of-term questionnaire was conducted to investigate how the assignment affected student awareness and use of the SAS, and whether they would have visited the SAS had there been no task. The results show that awareness of the SAS was raised. However, most students did not use the SAS post-assignment and indicated they would not have used it without the assignment. Reasons provided suggest time constraints, location, and issues of comfort to be contributing factors.

DIFFERENCES IN ORGANIZATIONAL PRACTICES AND PREFERENCES IN THE NAVY BY RACE This study had as its major goal the investigation of differences in organizational practices, preferences, and felt racial discrimination by race and racial composition of work groups in the Navy. The findings indicate there is little evidence of differences in organizational practices by race, especially among Blacks and Whites who together comprise the racial mainstream of American life. However, differences do occur when the racial composition of work groups are investigated. Respondents in work groups with supervisor of the same race view the conditions in the organization better than do those whose supervisor is of a different race. These findings may be an indication that the racial configuration of the work group differentiates in the practices where race alone does not. There are differences in the organizational preferences by both race and the racial composition of work groups, with Blacks generally being more concerned about having a job with different characteristics than Whites and Others, especially jobs which are firm in their economic rewards. Differences occur in the organizational preferences because respondents racially dissimilar to the supervisor generally attach greater importance to preferred job characteristics. These differences may reflect four race-related factors present in the general society and therefore present in the past experience base of the respondents: racial discrimination effects, level of aspiration or expectancy effects, comparative deprivation effects, and cultural differences. When felt racial discrimination on the job is examined by race, Blacks clearly feel more discrimination than Whites and those of Other races. This difference may reflect felt or perceived differential treatment by race, by Blacks in the Navy on aspects of work life not presently measured or similar treatment may be differentially interpreted by Blacks and Whites. When correlations between felt racial discrimination and organizational practices and preferences are investigated by race, the prevalent pattern of statistically significant correlations are negative for organizational practices for all three racial groups with correlations for Blacks higher than for Whites and Others. Overall, the findings TECHNICAL REPORT

Despite much being written about self-access learning and active learning, both still remain definitionally evasive concepts. How both are conceptualised is very often dependent upon how they are interpreted within the context they are implemented in. Hence, making sense of the relationship between self-access learning and active learning poses a problem, especially considering the dearth of literature available. With these points in mind, this study explored unknown, unexpressed, and unascertained student understandings of self-access learning to gauge what these suggest for enacting active learning at one private Japanese university. This was done via a qualitative case study using an open-ended survey with 53 Japanese university students majoring in English. The findings showed that learners have a vague conception of self-access learning, seeing it as an environmentally-situated behaviour where they are free to do what they want despite often being unclear about how to use their time and having no clear learning plans. These behaviours, taken together, suggest active learning is unlikely to emerge without initial learner comprehension and acceptance of self-access learning. Moreover, it is likely these cannot be enacted if the right kind of administrative support is not provided.

With the considerable amount of interest in content-based instruction (CBI) over the past decade, inevitably, CBI has found its way into Asian EFL contexts. This is largely due in part to its ‘success’ in ESL environments and its global attraction as a mode of language education for the world. Yet, in Asia, a number of significant concerns with CBI have repeatedly failed to attract much attention. These primarily relate to EFL students, EFL teachers, concept learning, and the research ‘supporting’ content-based instruction as it pertains to the negative implications of downplaying the importance of conventional language teaching. Consequently, this paper looks to examine these issues in the hopes of raising awareness of the disadvantages of using CBI in Asian EFL environments, and how it can inevitably prove problematic in such contexts.