Personality: Personality Traits as Independent and Dependent Variables

Abstract

Considering the massive amount of research on aptitude and motivation in second language acquisition (SLA), it is rather surprising that so little has been published on the effect of personality on SLA. Dörnyei (2005) suggests that this may be because from an educational perspective “the role and impact of personality factors are of less importance than those of some other individual differences variables such as aptitude and motivation” (p. 10). However, Dörnyei (2005) decided to include a chapter on “Personality, temperament and mood” in his book after coming across the following quotation by the psychologists Pervin and John (2001): “Personality is the part of the field of psychology that considers people in their entirety as individuals and as complex beings” (p. 3). The relatively limited interest in individual differences in personality and SLA stands in sharp contrast with the field of personality psychology, where several journals focus on individual differences, such as Personality and Individual Differences and Individual Differences in Learning. SLA researchers who have integrated psychological variables into their research designs have primarily done so in order to identify the personality traits that may be linked to success in SLA. The fact that so few significant relationships between personality traits and success in the second or foreign language (L2/FL) have been identified has puzzled researchers.KeywordsPersonality TraitForeign LanguageLanguage LearnerEmotional StabilityPersonality PsychologyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.