Beliefs About SLA: New Research Approaches makes an interesting contribution to the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), especially to the rekindled discussion of the characteristics of a good language learner. With contributions from leading researchers, this book will prove invaluable to applied linguists, graduate students and second/foreign language teachers seeking to raise their awareness of the complexity of beliefs and their role in second language education.
This edited collection of articles illustrates more recent work on beliefs about SLA, drawing on the thinking of (educational) philosophers and (discursive) psychologists, including Dewey, Bakhtin, Vygotsky, and Potter. The data for these reports have been collected by a variety of means, e.g., narratives, diary/journal entries, interviews, completion tasks, classroom observations, and subjected to a number of novel ways of analysis. The book puts past and present research into perspective by comparing and contrasting different approaches. Both beliefs from second/foreign language learners and teachers are subject of research. The contributions provide detailed accounts of starting points, definitions, methods of data collection and analysis, main findings and implications for further research.