Different personalities in L2 learning

    

     Personality determines what people feel comfortable with. As a result, people tend to choose and do what they feel comfortable with and get better at the given skills. Personality variables may be a major factor only in the acquisition of communicative skills, not in the acquisition of literacy or academic skills.

       There are a number of personality characteristics that affect SLA.

1. Extroversion vs. Introversion

Extroverts are considered sociable, energetic and impulsive. Whereas, introverts are believed to be quiet, isolated and shy. It is often argued that an extroverted person is well suited to language learning. 

The more extrovert language learners are, the more they are likely to join the group activities. Therefore, they increase their communicative skills which maximize the language output, so result in a better language proficiency.

2. Inhibition

Inhibition is the set of defenses an individual builds to protect themselves. 
The presence of a language ego is considered to be a major obstacle to the SLA process: the process of making mistakes, learning from those mistakes and a consequent improvement in the language skills. Those get inhibited by this ego.

For example, if learners did not dare to speak a sentence until they were absolutely certain of its total correctness, they would likely never communicate productively at all.

3. Risk-taking

Are the abilities of the brain for making the intelligent guess the information? According to the educational field, there are reasons created fear of risk-taking.

In the classroom: bad grade, fail in the exam and reproach from the teacher can make students fear of risk-taking in learning second language.

Outside the classroom: fear of looking ridiculous or fear of criticism can cause students fear of risk-taking in learning second language too.

Teachers have to create conditions of acceptance that will stimulate self-confidence and encourage students to experiment with their target language.

A number of studies have found that successful language learners make willing and accurate guesses. So, it is not always good to be impulsive to make a quick risk-taking.

4. Anxiety

It’s more likely to be dynamic and dependent on specific situations, self-esteem, and willingness.

For example, a student who feel anxious when giving an oral presentation in front of the whole class but not when interacting with peers in group-work. So, anxiety can play an important role in second language learning, accordingly, in this case, Group works affected student’s anxiety in learning languages in a positive way. Whereas, doing an individual assignment mostly caused the student to be anxious about using the language.