Personality Traits, Motivation and Foreign Language Attainment

Abstract

This paper reports on the results of a study of Chinese EFL learners’ personality traits and motivation in relation to their contributions to achievement in English at the tertiary level. An 88-item survey involving 934 first-year undergraduate non-English majors revealed that: (1) the participants were generally moderately extroverted, moderately prone to become anxious and be influenced by social desirability. Nevertheless, the majority reported to be dependent and tender-minded; (2) the majority of the participants reported to be moderately motivated to learn English; (3) the personality traits were significantly related to all or many of the motivation measures; and (4) most of the personality and motivation scales were significantly correlated with the students’ attainment in English, among which, language requirement, intrinsic motivation, psychoticism and lie were good predictors of the latter.