ABSTRACT
Since the mid-1990s, beliefs held by learners have started featuring in books about second language (L2) learning and teaching, discussed as one important individual difference (e.g. Ellis, 1994). At the beginning of the 2000s, beliefs were viewed as one of the contributions learners brought into the classroom (Breen, 2001), along with cognitive styles, attitudes, learning strategies, and motivation, or as one characteristic of the psychology of an L2 learner (Dörnyei, 2005, revised later as Dörnyei and Ryan, 2015). As such, beliefs play an important role in learners’ awareness of their approaches to learning L2s.
