A Case Study On The English Learners' Personality And Oral English Learning Strategy

With the development of the study on English learning strategies in recent years, more and more researches focus on the factors that influence the utilization of learning strategies, such as affection, age, gender, etc. However, few researchers have taken the learner's psychology into the utilization of learning strategy and few papers are concerned about the relationship between learners' personality and oral English learning strategy. Furthermore, most related studies (both abroad and at home) on the relationship between learners' personality and learning strategy are made in the quantitative way. Therefore, the qualitative study on the relationship between learners' personality and strategy use is in great demand.The qualitative study is a comprehensive research based on the result of questionnaire, semi-structured interview, diaries, tapes and classroom observation. The psychology questionnaire is used to testify the participants' personality. Interview is designed to investigate the frequency of use in oral English learning strategy. Diaries, tapes and classroom observation emphasize on the different strategy use between the introverts and the extroverts. To make an objective analysis of participants' personality, Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) was employed in the research. 93 students in Northeast Forestry University students were invited to attend in the survey. According to the result of EPQ, the participants were divided into three groups: the introverts, the extroverts and the neutral groups. Combined with the self-evaluation of the participants, ten specified experimental subjects were selected in the following steps such as interview and classroom observation. These ten participants were divided into Group A (the introvert group) and Group B (the extrovert group). The semi-structured interview, dairies and classroom observation were designed to investigate the difference of oral strategy use between Group A and Group B.After a series of data analysis, two major findings have been achieved: (1) there exists the correlation between learners' personality and oral English learning strategy. (2) different use in oral English learning between the introverts and extroverts are investigated in the field of memory, cognitive, affective, compensation and meta-cognitive strategies. At the same time, some similarities in use of oral English learning strategy have been discovered. The frequency of memory strategies is the lowest and the frequency of the cognitive strategy is the highest. Therefore, language teacher are suggested to establish the personality file to record the basic information about students' personality, which is beneficial to communicating better with the college students in the limited time of classroom. At the same time teacher are required to help students to improve their oral English learning strategy. In another way, the English learner should balance the importance of indirect strategies and directed strategies. Memory strategy should focus learners' attention to improve their English fluency and proficiency. Although there are some limitations in the number of participants and the time of the experiment, the in-depth data analysis in the case study is valuable for the relative research for the further study in the field of second language learning.