The Effect Of Motivated Strategies For Learning And Computer Self-Efficacy On The Use Of A Self-Access Center

Technology has been sneaking in our lives for a long time now. It has also come into play in education through the use of educational technologies in and out of the classroom. Language teaching has not been an exception for this ever-growing trend in education. Starting with OHDs and audio-lingual language teaching labs, the use of technology in language teaching has extended to the use of more sophisticated hardware and software utilized to turn the language learning experience into a more gratifying involvement. Self-access centers, in which learners can be autonomously exposed to more authentic and comprehensible input, have been established in a great many language-teaching institutions worldwide. This study aims to disclose the motivated strategies for learning that impinge upon how frequently language learners in our institution use self-access centers. It also endeavors to figure out whether learners? computer self-efficacy is associated with their self-access center use. To do this, we recorded 180 participants? log-ins and their study time during an 8-week instructional module. This provided us with a quantitative measure of how frequently and how long our participants made use of the self-access system during the module. The system was forced to shut down if no action took place for three minutes to make sure that the study time we measured was valid. Participants? motivated learning strategies were estimated using the MSLQ (Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire) (Pintrich et al., 1993). To determine their computer self-efficacy levels, the participants were administered the Computer Self-Efficacy Scale (Murphy, Coover, and Owen, 1989). Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients were gathered to see what specific variables significantly affected participants? self-access center use.