Viewing learner beliefs through SCT

SCT focuses on symbolic tools such as language to mediate cognitive

development with the external social world through interactional means. This offers fresh perspectives on understanding the emergence, nature and development of learner beliefs about language learning.

Within such a framework, learner beliefs may be viewed as a special kind of cultural and psychological tool used by learners to help mediate their learning within specific contexts of social interaction. SCT would prioritise the

emergence of such tools as occurring through the use of dialogic speech with others during the development stage known as other regulation. Such instances of collaboration may have occurred during both formal and informal learning opportunities for learners with a wide range of other people in different contexts. All of these previous experiences would have helped to shape the very nature of the beliefs that they carry with them about language and language learning and in Bakhtin’s terminology, made them ‘multi-voiced’. With time, some of these constructed beliefs may become part of the learners’ internal knowledge reservoir and be used to help ‘self- regulate or mediate’ (Vygotsky 1978, 1986) their future actions with the environment. At this point, learners would be

When considering the development of learner beliefs, SCT’s construction of beliefs as born through interaction with the social world has much to offer. Such a perspective reinforces the contextual view of beliefs as something dynamic and capable of change. When learners are expressing their beliefs about language and language learning, they are at the very same time shaping and constructing those ideas too. As Alanen (2003 p. 58) writes:

‘… language is both external and internal: it belongs at the same time both to the speech community and the individual member of that community. The means that individual members use to mediate their actions, whether internal or external, have a social origin and are influenced by the social, cultural and historical context.’

Thus, learner beliefs seen from this perspective offer us a view of beliefs as malleable entities capable of constant change, fluctuation and evolution through both specific instances of social interaction but also throughout their existence. As a result, the beliefs are in a constant cycle of dialogue with the social world both appropriating and transforming the running discourse (Bakhtin 1986). Several studies support the view that learners’ beliefs are capable of change and not static entities impervious to the outside world. Peng (2011) tracked how the beliefs of a Chinese college student changed over a 7-month period quite substantively as mediated by classroom affordances. Yang and Kim (2011) applied Vygotskian SCT to study belief changes in two Korean students studying abroad – one in the US and the other in the Philippines. They found evidence of how each student, despite being exposed to similar opportunities with respect to learning, differed in terms of how their beliefs developed over time. Yang and Kim suggested that individual differences between the learners

in the way in which they interacted with their relative learning environments played an important role. Zhong (2015) followed two Chinese migrant learners in a language school in New Zealand using a longitudinal case-study approach and found that their beliefs had shifted from being quite analytical towards their learning at the start to becoming more collaborative/experiential with time. Alanen (2003 p. 79) suggests how some beliefs used to mediate learning may be ‘more permanent than others … [while others will be] constructed in a very specific context of activity to mediate a very specific action and then perhaps to be discarded, never to be used again’. This allows us the possibility of

constructing learners as individuals who hold their beliefs about language and language learning with varying levels of intensity and desire, where some are held on to more tenaciously than others and as such, more resistant to change. This resembles Rokeach (1968), who divides beliefs into core and peripheral beliefs and sees the former type as related more to a person’s identity and influential to their other beliefs.

In conclusion, beliefs are seen as situated, socially constructed, cultural and psychological tools that learners have developed to help mediate their learning of a second language. They are complex, idiosyncratic and highly personalised artefacts that are polyphonic in nature, echoing the voices of both past and present experiences that the learner has engaged in with significant others including friends, family and teachers in a variety of contexts.

They are also dynamic and capable of change in response to changing contexts and experiences. Learners may reach a state of self-regulation over some beliefs resulting in them being retained and refined over a longer period of time while others will be more ephemeral in nature. Such beliefs are still developing,

less tenaciously held and thus more susceptible to being altered or adapted by the demands of the context. As beliefs as mediation tools are in a constant state of flux, learners can hold opinions on language and learning that are both

complementary and contradictory in nature at the same time.