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Description
Teacher/learner beliefs, as an individual difference (ID) variable, is one of the most frequently studied factors in Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) research. Despite a relatively large number of studies investigating teachers’ and learners’ beliefs about TBLT, there is a lack of synthesis on this topic. Therefore, this chapter provides a systematic review of studies on learner/teacher beliefs in the context of TBLT. This review aims to identify the foci, conceptualisation, operationalisation of beliefs in TBLT, methodological characteristics, and major themes in the findings reported in TBLT studies on beliefs. The results show that there is a lack and/or variation in the conceptualisation and operationalisation of the concept of beliefs. Additionally, studies have focused more on teachers’ beliefs about TBLT as compared to those of learners. The results also revealed methodological issues (e.g., lack of some important background information about the participants and the study’s context; lack of conceptualising the construct of belief; focusing dominantly on English as a target language; dominantly adopting the normative approach over the contextual approach; lack of clear and rigorus procedure for analying data, designing, and validating data collection tools). Despite these issues, the results show that TBLT research on beliefs appears to head toward an appropriate direction, adopting multi-method approaches, and using diverse data collection tools. Also, the results show a promising picture for adopting and implementingof TBLT in diverse contexts from both teachers’ and learners’ perspectives. However, multiple issues still need to be addressed in a long run.
