A Correlational Study Of Personality Type And Business English Oral Fluency Of Chinese Students

Oral fluency is an ability that foreign language (FL) or second language (L2) learners tend to place great importance on, and according many FL/L2 teachers' observation, oral fluency varies with personality types. However, studies done to investigate the correlation between personality types and FL/L2 oral fluency have not been comprehensive enough. The present study thus tries to contribute to the research into this field.The present research is a correlational study of introversion/extraversion (I/E) personality types and business English (BE) oral fluency of Chinese BE students. To be more specific, it aims to investigate (1) the correlation between I/E personality types and the BE oral fluency in terms of speech rapidity, (2) the correlation between I/E personality types and the BE oral fluency in terms of speech smoothness, and (3) the correlation between I/E personality types and the overall BE oral fluency in terms of both speech rapidity and speech smoothness. Furthermore, if such correlations exist, the present study aims to reveal which type of students tends to do better.To investigate the correlation between business English oral fluency and I/E personality type, the present study used the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (1981) to test the I/E personality types of 67 Chinese BE students, an oral test to elicit their English oral production in a business context, and relevant indices, i.e. temporal indices and performing index, to measure the oral fluency.The results of the correlation analysis of the study show that there is a significant correlation between I/E personality types and BE oral fluency. Specifically, there is a significant correlation between I/E personality types and BE oral fluency of Chinese BE students in terms of (1) speech rapidity (medium correlation), (2) speech smoothness (weak correlation), and (3) both speech rapidity and speech smoothness (medium correlation). Furthermore, the results of the t-test also show extraverted students tend to outperform introverted students in all three aspects mentioned above.The above results can be explained within the theoretical framework of this study. Based on Levelt's (1989) speech production model and Eysenck's personality model (1967, 1985, 1990), a working-memory-based theoretical framework of the correlation between the I/E personality type and FL/L2 oral fluency was constructed. It was proposed that students with different personality types, introversion or extroversion, tend to differ in the efficiency of their working memory, and are therefore supposed to perform differently in their English oral production in terms of English oral fluency, and extraverted students shall outperform introverted students owing to extraverted students' higher working memory efficiency.Theoretically, the findings of the present study show that the proposed working-memory-based theoretical framework makes sense in explaining the difference in BE oral fluency between introversion and extraversion personality types. Practically, the findings of the present study give spoken language teachers some implications on oral class teaching.Further studies need to be done to investigate whether other dimensions of personality types also correlate with FL/L2 oral fluency, involving more subjects and adopting more fluency indices.