The perception of the English Department's students of Widya Mandala Catholic University who become the members of the self-access center toward the existence of the self-access center

It is no doubt that English as an international language plays a very pertinent role in every aspects of life. English is used in business, art, and of course education. Therefore, English learners should have enough knowledge and skills of English. The knowledge and skills w,e get from our lecturers only is not enough, we have to try to gain more by being active learners. The needs to find English knowledge and practice it outside the class motivated the English Department of Widya Mandala Catholic University to establish SAC. SAC, which is the abbreviation of Self-Access Center, is a place where learner is getting information from or putting information into by him or herself The writer is interested to study more about SAC because SAC is a new students' facility, which is lack of publication so that it has not been known well by students, especially those from high semester and other faculty. The writer conducted her study with thirty subjects: fifteen 99th academic year students, ten 98th academic year students, three 97th academic year students, two 96th academic year students, and 0 95th academic year student This calculation was taken from the percentage of the SAC attendance list of April and May 2000. The instruments to collect the research data were questionnaire and indepth interview. From her study she found that 77.23% of the English Department's students who become the SAC members gave positive answers toward the questions in the questionnaire and only 18.84% of the students gave negative answers. Positive here is in the sense that the students agree or feel that SAC really improves their English mastery; while negative here means the students do not feel or agree that SAC improves their English mastery. From this finding, which is also supported by the data got from the in-depth interview, she concluded that almost all of the students of the English Department of the Widya Mandala Catholic University who become the members of the SAC have positive perception toward the existence of WMCU Self-Access Center