Exploring preparatory school efl learners' and teachers' beliefs about language learning

In the study, the primary aim was to explore preparatory school students' and teachers' beliefs about language learning at Gazi University in Turkey. The second aim was to investigate whether teachers' beliefs and practices exert an impact on learners' beliefs. The study included 620 students and 33 teachers. The BALLI (Horwitz, 1987), a student interview and a teacher interview were used to gather well-rounded data about the learners' and the teachers' beliefs about language learning. The interviews showed that teachers' practices are parallel with their beliefs and that they exhibit different types of teacher beliefs about language learning. Since different beliefs and practices may not leave the same effect on learner beliefs, the teachers and the learners were categorized into three groups in accordance with the teachers' beliefs about language learning and their classroom practices. The teachers' and the learners' beliefs about language learning were discussed under these groups. Descriptive statistics and content analysis were used to analyze the data. The findings indicated that after taking English classes for 5 months, there were some significant differences in the learners' beliefs. However, the significance of changes and the statements that contain significant differences were varied markedly in each group. Also, the learners' beliefs in the post-test showed parallelism with their teachers' beliefs. The findings of the study led to some conclusions: 1) The teachers' beliefs and practices had an impact on learner beliefs, 2) learner beliefs tended to show similarity with teacher beliefs in time and 3) the teachers were influential in exerting an impact on learner beliefs. Furthermore, the study indicated that belief change is possible but a radical change in beliefs about language learning requires considerable amount of time and effort. Key words: Beliefs about language learning, Learner beliefs, Teacher beliefs, Belief change, Teachers' effect on learner beliefs