A questionnaire was developed for this study based on the English Learning Questionnaire de- vised by Yang (1999). It was composed of the following three parts: Horwitz’s (1987) Beliefs About Language Learning Inventory (BALLI), Oxford’s (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL), and demographic questions.
The first part had 35 items with statements on beliefs about language learning.2 The partici- pants were asked to rate the statements on a five-point Likert scale ranging from 5 (strongly agree)
to 1 (strongly disagree) in 33 items. The remaining two items had a different scale and response options. They measured the difficulty level of the target language (Item 4) and the period of time
necessary to learn a new foreign language (Item 15), respectively. The statement wording in the
questionnaire used in this study was basically the same as Yang’s (1999) questionnaire and the original BALLI, except the term “English” was changed to “Chinese” or “Japanese,” depending on the target languages of the participants. Other necessary changes were also made in the following three cases. First, the term “Americans” was replaced by “Chinese people” or “Japanese people” in two items (Items 13 and 24). In another item (Item 32), “American friends” was replaced by “Chi- nese friends” or “Japanese friends.” Furthermore, “English-speaking country” (Item 12) and “Eng- lish-speaking cultures” (Item 8) were replaced by “China” or “Japan” and “Chinese cultures” or “Japanese cultures,” respectively. Additionally, another change was made to the wording for an- other reason. The phrase “cassettes or tapes” (Item 26) was replaced by “audio-visual materials
(such as CDs and DVDs)” in order to conform to the current technological situation. The third part of the instrument included demographic questions about age, gender, nationality, native language, type of secondary school, and so forth. This paper reports the results from the first part of the ques- tionnaire (i.e. BALLI) in conjunction with those from the third part.