WITH THE ADVENT OF communicative language teaching in the 1970s, the trend in foreign language (FL) teaching became to implement more student-centered than teacher-centered approaches and more meaningful communicative activities than mechanical grammar drills. With this shift in the way FLs were being taught, it has become necessary to examine student and teacher perceptions regarding effective FL teaching and successful FL learning, and a number of research studies have been conducted to this end. These studies have investigated student and teacher perceptions about FL teaching and learning and have accounted for gender and age of students and teachers, background in learning FLs, and expected grades in FL courses, but to date, none have focused on the effect of student and teacher belief systems on the teaching and learning of specific languages.

Over the past twenty-five years, researchers in FL teaching and learning have maintained that when students’ and teachers’ belief systems about FL learning do not match, students are more likely to be dissatisfied with a particular FL course and may even discontinue study of the FL. In my article “Behaviors and Attitudes of Effective Foreign Language Teachers,” I propose that “a study that would compare and match teacher and student belief systems would be another step in explaining effective FL teaching behaviors,” and Luke Plonsky and Susane Mills recommend that “exploratory studies are needed in which teachers delve into their students’ perceptions of EC [error correction] and other practices common to the L2 classroom.”

Because incongruities between teacher and student beliefs about how German should be taught can be harmful to students’ overall success in learning German, it is important for teachers to identify students’ perceptions about various aspects of FL learning that teachers and researchers believe to facilitate successful language acquisition.5 With knowledge of their students’ views on various areas in learning German, teachers may be able to avoid or at least prepare to manage possible inconsistencies between their own beliefs and those of their students. This is particularly important given enrollment challenges some German programs currently face.