ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on beliefs about language, and language learning and teaching held by second language (L2) learners. It reviews the developments in research on L2 learner beliefs: definitions and approaches and their underlying assumptions, and ways of collecting and analysing data. The chapter discusses the implications from the perspective of researchers by pointing out directions for research and from the perspective of practitioners by addressing language awareness. It traces more developments in research on L2 learner beliefs by reviewing a few studies as they relate to the contextual approaches. Most of which have already gained a strong foothold in the field of applied linguistics: the discursive, sociocultural/dialogical, affective, and complexity/ecological approaches. To conclude, the relationship of a learner's beliefs and practices in learning L2s is acknowledged to be more complex and in doing further studies, research designs and methodologies used should be sensitive enough to capture all the possibilities involved in raising learners' awareness of their beliefs.
