The Influence Of Introverted And Extroverted Students' Learning Strategies On Their Oral English Performance

Language learning strategy is an important aspect of second language learning. As one of the factors influencing strategy choice, the significance of personality types has received more and more attention. Recent research has shown that the success of second language (L2) learners is due not only to cognitive factors such as language aptitude, but also to affective, motivational, personality, and demographic factors (Carroll, 1990; Ehrman & Oxford, 1995). Furthermore, in order to provide effective, sensitive instruction, teachers of L2s need to learn to identify and understand their students' significant individual differences (Ehrman, 1995). Research into individual learner differences and their relationships to language learning strategies is a growing area (Bacon, 1992; Wen, 1996; Wang, 1996). More and more researchers realized one major individual variable is personality.The present researches on the connection between personality and English learning strategies are more around extroversion/introversion and integrative competence, less on Oral English competence. This paper explores the influence of extroversion and introversion factors on EFL learners' oral performance.The study randomly selected 45 students as subjects and adopted the survey questionnaires and the test. All the statistical analyses were carried out with the authorized software Excel 2003 and SPSS 13 for windows.The results of the study shows that the extroverts tend to use learning strategies more frequently than introverts on the whole. In addition, the extroverts generally use more directive strategies, i.e. the memory, cognitive and compensation strategies than introvert learners. There is no connection between extroversion/introversion and oral English competence. The frequent use of cognitive strategies and meta-cognitive strategies is important for the success of oral English learning. The total use of the oral learning strategies for both the introverts and the extroverts groups are at the medium level, not desirable, far from enough. The results of the present study revealed the importance of learning strategies in the successful achievement of oral English learning. The findings of the study provided some useful implications for the teaching and learning.Although this study comes up with some valuable revelation and suggestion, there are some limitations in it. Due to the authors' knowledge and experience in the research field of language learning strategy, and the limitation of time and fund, there is still room left to be improved in the further research.