Beliefs are notoriously difficult to define and evaluate, but there do appear to be a number of helpful statements that we can make about them. They tend to be culturally bound, to be formed early in life and to be resistant to change. Beliefs about teaching, for example, appear to be well established by the time a student gets to college (Weinstein 1989). They are closely related to what we think we know but provide an affective filter which screens, redefines, distorts, or reshapes subsequent thinking and information processing (Nespor 1987). Our beliefs about one particular area or subject will not only be interconnected, but will also be related to other more central aspects of our personal belief systems, e.g. our attitudes and values about the world and our place within it. Because they are difficult to measure, we usually have to infer people's beliefs from the wars in which they behave rather than from what they say they believe (Agyris and Schon 1974).
We have stressed earlier the importance of teachers reflecting upon their own actions in order to make explicit their often implicit belief systems and to help them clarify what is personally meaningful and significant to them in their professional roles.

Teachers' beliefs about what learning is will affect everything that they do in the classroom, whether these beliefs are implicit or explicit. Even if a teacher acts spontaneously, or from habit without thinking about the action,' such actions are nevertheless prompted by a deep- rooted belief that may never have been articulated or made explicit. Thus teachers' deep-rooted beliefs about how languages are learned will pervade their classroom actions more than a particular methodology they are told to adopt or coursebook they follow. If the teacher-as-educator is one who is constantly re-evaluating in the light of new knowledge his or her beliefs about language, or about how language is learned, or about education as a whole, then it is crucial that teachers first understand and articulate their own theoretical perspectives.

Beliefs about learners
Teachers may hold any one or a combination of beliefs about those whom they teach. The sociologist Roland Meighan has suggested that there are at least seven different wars in which teachers can and do construe learner and that such constructions reflect individual teachers' views of the world and also have a profound influence on their classroom practice (Meighan and Meighan 1990).
Meighan suggests that learner may be construed metaphorically as:
• resisters;
• receptacies;
• raw material;
• clients'
• partners;
• individual explorers;
• democratic explorers.
He sees these constructs in terms of a continuum which reflects the nature of the teacher-learner power relationship. Thus the first three constructs are heavily teacher dominated while the latter constructs involve increasingly active learner participation.
The notion of learners as resisters sees learners as people who do not want to learn but only do so because they are made to. Such a view has given rise to the commonly associated assumption that force or punishment is the most appropriate way of overcoming such resistance in the classroom. Even at its most benign, the assumption that children do not start with what Bruner calls 'the will to learn' will lead to a view that instruction is the natural function of the teacher.