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In applied linguistics, interest in student beliefs (or metacognitive knowledge) about second language acquisition (SLA) is fairly recent, growing out of the emphasis on learner autonomy and on learner strategies in SLA. The purpose of this paper is to review those few studies that have been published so far, to give an outline of definitions of beliefs and research methodology, and finally to provide alternatives to these, based on recent developments in the social sciences. With a reconsideration of beliefs come reconsiderations of research data and methods.

With the second cognitive revolution, a new paradigm is emerging in (social) psychology: positivism is giving way to social constructionism. Consequently, this paper argues for a redefinition of terms and reconsideration of methodology in research on language attitudes. More specifically, it argues that mentalistic definitions of attitudes be replaced with social ones, and experimentation with the matched-guise technique with discourse-analytic research. These developments are illustrated with a qualitative study concerning the attitudes or views held by college students towards English in Finland, based on their written responses to a letter-to-the-Editor that basically argued against the use of English in the country for a number of reasons.

As part of a larger project, we studied how a foreign language test got discursively constructed in the talk of upper-secondary-school leavers. A group of students were asked to keep an oral diary to record their ideas, feelings and experiences of preparing for and taking the test over the last spring term of school, as part of a high-stakes national examination. In addition, they took part in discussions either in pairs or groups of three after having learned about the final test results. After transcribing the data, drawing on a form of discourse analysis originally launched by a group of social psychologists, we identified (at least) four interpretative repertoires in the students' accounts -with different constructions of themselves as test-takers, the test, and their performance in the test -including expectations and explanations for success or failure as well as credit or blame. The findings point to variation in the uses of these repertoires, not only from one context to another but also from moment to moment. I IntroductionWe are involved in a project focusing on a high-stakes English test and one critical aspect of its validity, that is, its values and social consequences, referred to in the assessment field as consequential validity. In this article, we report on a longitudinal study on how the test was discursively constructed in the talk of students who took it over the last term of school.As background to our study, we begin by summarizing related previous studies and by describing the examination and the English test in it. After this, we spell out the starting points of our study, it being very different from previous ones in some respects. We then move on to explain the research design of our study, more