Towards the design of a quality management model in a self-access centre in Mexico: enhancing learner autonomy and language competence.

Abstract

The aim of this study is to understand how a quality management system together with the principles of ISO 9001:2015 can serve as tools to plan, monitor and impact on the development of autonomy and language competence of language learners through the services offered in a to evaluate Self-Learning Language Centre (SALC). The study itself takes place in a tertiary Mexican context.
The idea of implementing a quality management system is based on the principle that a well-organized institution should be able to minimize the impact of product defects (educational services) and continuously improve product performance (service). For the purposes of this study, the product performance evaluation focuses on two of the main services offered by the self-access language centre in this study; namely the language advice and the language learning workshops.
The main study addresses the perceptions that student users, language learning advisors and other stakeholders have of the SALC and any issues they face. It relates these to the quality management principles and the management processes present in the SALC and the impact on the development of learner autonomy and language competence. Based on the findings, an Operational Process Model (OPM) will be designed with the aim of adapting the original model to the given needs of a self-learning centre and harmonizing the processes to increase learner autonomy and language proficiency with various services provided at a SALC.
This OPM is then intended to serve as a flexible management and assessment tool for SALC managers and administrators in different contexts, giving them an overview of the SALC processes from input (what was planned) to output (what was achieved). This means that the goal of the model is to give users a clearer idea of what to do, how to do it, how to evaluate it, and how to improve it. This new OPM is based on a synthesis of key study results supported by ISO requirements (ISO 9001:2015).

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Identifiers

ORCID for Beatriz Eugenia Navarro Cira: orcid.org/0000-0002-5119-3629

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