A Comparative Study On Middle School Students' Foreign Language Learning Beliefs Between Second Foreign Language Learners And Non-second Foreign Language Learners

With the increase of setting second foreign language courses in middle schools in China,more and more middle students begin to learn a second foreign language.However,middle school second foreign language learners have received limited attention from scholars in that the research subjects of studies on second foreign language learning are mainly aimed at college students of foreign language majors.As learners' foreign language learning beliefs significantly influence their language learning process and outcome,the author conducts a research to compare middle school students' foreign language learning beliefs between second foreign language learners and non-second foreign language learners to explore if learning a second foreign language and the second foreign language variation make a difference on their foreign language learning beliefs and what are the possible influential factors,if there are any statistically significant differences.A modified questionnaire,BALLI,designed by Horwitz in 1988 and translated in Chinese,is applied to 379 students from Grade eight in a foreign languages school at Wuhan.Since there are three types of second foreign languages,German,French,and Spanish,Independent Sample T-tests are conducted in different grouping categories.Therefore,not only the whole second foreign language group,but also the subgroups of second foreign language group are compared with non-second foreign language group;the comparisons are also conducted within the subgroups of second foreign language group.Later,based on the acquired statistically significant differences,semi-structured interviews are conducted among thirteen second foreign language learners to find out the possible influential factors.The research findings are shown as follows.First,learning a second foreign language indeed exerts influences on middle school students' foreign language learning beliefs.And French group is found to show significant differences the most,with German group the less and Spanish group the least.Then,different second foreign languages exert influences differently.And German group and French group are found to show significant differences on seventeen terms,which cover all the five areas of foreign language learning beliefs.At last,it is found that there are external factors like middle school students' family background and their learning experiences,textbooks and extra-curricular books,the teachers' personal charm and teaching style,the future plan of going abroad,schoolwork burden,and learning and teaching resources.For internal factors,there are personality,interest,and the faculty of memory and longings for having one more competence.