Gender effect on multilingual students' beliefs about learning English as a foreign language

The relationship between language learning beliefs and gender has been in the focus of many researchers over the last two decades since beliefs are influential on language learning process. Likewise, multilingualism has been another interest of researchers in the context of EFL all around the worldwide. This mixed method study investigates the gender effect on multilingual learners' beliefs about learning English as a foreign language and aims to show the role of motivation and expectation in EFL with significant results. The Beliefs about Language Learning Inventory (BALLI) was administered to 167 EFL learners, 92 females and 75 males, in a multilingual setting, in a state middle school located in the Eastern Anatolian Region of Turkey. Data was analyzed with SPSS Program (SPSS Statistics, Version 22.0) by using the "Wilcoxon-Mann Whitney" test to find the gender difference. Content analysis was implemented to analyze learners' responses for open-ended question in the questionnaire. Findings show that female learners' beliefs about EFL are stronger than that of male learners in terms of motivation and expectation. Except motivation and expectation, both female and male learners held the similar beliefs about EFL.