THE IMPORTANCE OF LEARNERS’ BELIEFS IN LEARNING AND TEACHING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

This paper describes learners’ beliefs about foreign language learning and teaching. The introduction discusses various definitions of learner beliefs and conflicting attitudes of some authors in this regard. The second part of the paper is a description of a research covering 120 elementary school students who have been learning English as their second language. BALLI questionnaire (Beliefs about Language Learning Inventory) was used to collect the data. Learner beliefs about foreign language aptitude, the nature and difficulty of language learning, learning and communication strategies and motivation are analyzed and interpreted in the light of practical experience in the classroom. The implications of these findings for EFL teaching are discussed in the final part of the paper.