The Impact of Personality Traits on English-majored students' learning strategies

Abstract

The individual disparities between the learners, or why some students often acquire foreign languages more quickly than others, are among the most studied and essential topics of second language acquisition. Age, linguistic ability, personality, learning styles, strategies, etc., are some of the most prevalent individual differences. This study was intended to find out (1) the learning strategies extrovert English-majored students prefer, (2) the learning strategies introvert English-majored students prefer, and (3) the differences between introverts’ and extroverts’ preferences for learning strategies. The 68 freshmen participants, were English-majored freshmen from the School of Foreign Language of a tertiary institution at the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data in order to determine mean frequencies and statistical differences. The finding revealed that the majority of participants fell into an extrovert, 42.65% (29 students), followed by introverts, just 25% (17 students), and 32.35% of ambiverts (22 students). The research results showed that extroverts’ most frequently used strategies are affective, introverts’ most frequently used strategies are cognitive, whereasambiverts’ most frequently used strategies affective.