On Relationship Between Personality Traits And English Learning Achievements Of University Students

Personality traits, being significant parts in assessing foreign language achievements, have attracted the attention from philosophers, psychologists, also those who are in the field of psycholinguistics, applied linguistics etc. More recently, researchers who focused primarily on the study of foreign language learners' achievements have diverted their attention from solely discussions on linguistic variables to the examination of psychological determinants such as 'individual difference variables', that is, various relatively stable learner characteristics such as language aptitude, motivation, and personality features. These have been found to exert pervasive influences on various learners' behaviors, including English language learning.The whole thesis is divided into three sections in addition to an introduction and a conclusion. Chapter One mainly studies the concept, the classification and the theoretical models of personality traits given by many scholars such as: personality traits are "dimensions of individual differences in tendencies to show consistent patterns of thoughts, feelings, and actions"(McCrae and Costa, 1990). Eysenk who thinks that personality is the summation of actual and potential human behavior patterns influenced by individual heredity and the environment. Allport believes that personality is the dynamic organization. J.M Burger thinks that personality is the steadily individual behavior pattern and individual communicative process. Though different personality theories work at different levels of explanatory complexity, psychologists generally agree that a complete theory of personality should address the questions of what the characteristics of persons are and how they are organized. This part also devotes more attention to the Five Factor Model and tries to explain why it is widely adopted for the past few decades. Chapter Two offers a theoretical interpretation of the relationship between personality traits and English learning achievements based on the previous researches. Chapter Three covers a comprehensive summary of positive study of the relationship between personality traits and English learning achievements. The purpose of the present study is to investigate further the relationship between personality traits and English learning achievements. The measurements of personality traits are developed and involve general expressions of attitudes toward learning English, interests in foreign languages, and behaviours such as persistence and attention that would relate to any language learning. It is believed that by investigating the factor structure underlying the relationships among these variables, a better understanding may be gained of the role of personality traits and other affective variables in English learning. For the past few decades, studies on English learning achievements have mainly focused on theoretical analysis. More recently, researchers start to shift their attention to individual differences among English learners. Since previous researchers discussed the relationship between personality traits and foreign language achievements only from single dimension or subdimension perspectives of personality traits. My thesis tries to give a full description on the relationship between personality traits and English achievements. The positive part mainly contains two studies. Study One investigates whether correlation exists between the two variables (personality traits and English learning achievements) by adopting the Pearson product moment correlation method, No significant correlations are found between English achievements and the Big Five traits except Extraversion. From the results, we can see that Extraversion is the strongest correlate of English learning achievements. Then I adopt the method of One-Way ANOVA to see whether significant differences of English learning achievements are found among different levels of each dimension. The results show that there are significant differences of English achievements among different levels of Extraversio...