Literature Review

The Beliefs About Language Learning Inventory (BALLI) was developed by Horwitz (1988) to assess the learners' beliefs about secondary/foreign language learning. In the past two decades, extensive research was devoted to this field. Although some articles also provided other methodologies, most of the researchers took BALLI as the researching tool and conducted their studies based on the result of this survey.


Much research had discussed the factors that influence the learners' beliefs and the changes in them. Bernet and Lloyd (2007), for example, explored the gender effect on EFL learners' beliefs and found that beliefs were mostly similar. Also, Diab (2006) found that students' beliefs about learning English and French in Lebanon were different. However, most of the studies tried to find how the environmental factors influence the beliefs. Kern (1995) found that teachers' beliefs only had little influence on students' beliefs at the global level. Mantle-Bromley (1995) found that students usually have many misconceptions, and the teaching style of their teachers seems to make a difference in the the beliefs. Horwitz (1999) concentrated on the cultural factors and found difficulty in teasing apart culture and learning context. Tanaka and Ellis (2003) conducted their research on 166 students during a 15-month period studying abroad, and found changes in analytical, experiential language learning and self-efficacy, but no effect on proficiency. Amuzie and Winke (2009) conducted similar research on 70 students studying abroad and found that the duration had effect on the change of learners' beliefs.


As the conclusions of Amuzie and Winke (2009) and Tanaka and Ellis (2003), studying abroad may influence the change of learners'beliefs. However, more than two countries assigned English as one of the official languages, the effect of studying abroad may also be relative to the culture of these countries. Advanced research about learning English abroad in different countries could be conducted to discuss the difference.