Qunyan Zhong

Chinese Esl Learners in New Zealand: the Beliefs and Learner Strategies of Low-proficiency Chinese Esl Learners and Their Impact on Learning English Qunyan Zhong

Over the last two decades or so, considerable development has taken place in research studies on learner beliefs. However, to date few studies have attempted to investigate the development of learner beliefs and the interactions among learner beliefs,learner strategies and learning. This book reports a multicase study which employed a naturalistic inquiry to investigate the development of five Chinese language learners? beliefs, their learner strategy use and learning over a 16 week period. The study identified some major changes in the learners? beliefs and strategies. It reveals gains in the learners? proficiency were linked to their learner strategy use,which was underpinned by their beliefs. However,this relationship did not hold true when the learners failed to implement their beliefs. This suggests that beliefs do not have a direct impact on learning and that their influence depends on whether they have an effect on learning strategies. Based on these findings,the author proposed a model aiming to capture the interactions among the three constructs and learning contexts. This book should be especially useful to language teachers, language policy makers and researchers in SLA.