Focusing on the future of SALL: A response to Stacey Vye

This article is a response to Vye’s (2023) review of Everhard’s 2022 article in Relay Journal. I pick up on the themes that Vye identified in her review about the challenges facing the future of physical self-access learning centres, and relate Vye’s experiences in her context to my own at a different institution in the same country, Japan. I agree with Vye’s confidence that self-access language learning (SALL) will weather any coming storm, due to its adaptability and student-centred focus. I also see major advantages in the recent technological innovations accelerated by the pandemic, particularly in the way that familiarity with video-conferencing tools has encouraged the personal connections so important to SALL to be reimagined online, enhancing the quality of online learning and giving it a stronger focus on the development of learner autonomy.