The influence of personality traits on the silence of advanced level English language students

Abstract

The aim of this work is to investigate personality traits that could be related to the silence (in the classroom) of students of English as a foreign language at advanced levels of study. According to Krashen’s “silent period” concept, it is natural that students at the beginning of the learning process of a new language go through a period in which they remain silent, just receiving linguistic input, until they have acquired some knowledge and the necessary confidence to start talking. Some students, however, tend to remain silent in class, even at higher levels of language study. In this investigation, we focus on how these students act in class. This work is based on studies about personality traits involved in the language teaching and learning process carried out by Brown (2000), Ellis (1996), among others. The methodology of the research involves interviews, field notes, questionnaires, student´s retrospective self- evaluation, and audio and video recordings with students from two intermediate- advanced level groups and three advanced level groups of a private language institute. The goal is to identify and discuss possible factors that contribute to the lack of oral participation of these students in class, as well as their beliefs regarding the foreign language teaching and learning process, especially as it is related to oral practice. Through this work we verified, for example, that a personality trait like introversion may lead some students to prefer individual work – and contact with the textbook – to working with their classmates. When they are asked to work in pairs, in order to practice the target language, these students tend to speak as little as possible, focusing their attention on the book or notebook, while others are still interacting.