The influence of students' beliefs on their speaking performance

Abstract

The study concerns about the influence of students’ beliefs on their speaking performance. To examine the students’ beliefs, a modified questionnaire of Horwitz (1988) about Beliefs about Language Learning Inventory (BALLI) including 20 statements was used for data collection. Each statement was evaluated according to the 5 Likert scales. Informants of the study include 40 English majors of DHAV5. In addition, ten of them were asked to talk for about five minutes on given topic for further performance assessments. The questionnaire covered five themes as follows: (A) The Foreign Language Aptitude; (B) The Difficulty of Language Learning; (C) The Nature of Language Learning; (D) Learning and Communication Strategies; (E) Motivation and Expectation. Then, the influence of beliefs on speaking performance was assessed based on their academic points and supplementary presentations rated by the criteria of Royal Society of Art (RSA) (Arthur Hughes, Testing for Language Teacher, 1996).Results showed that students under study of different groups seem to have different beliefs. While, most subjects believed that speaking was a difficult task, more average students under study believed that the grammar rules are important and that learning a foreign language was a matter of translating from the foreign language into mother tongue.Findings indicate that students’ beliefs should be well addressed and informed by teachers in order to help them improve their performance.