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1、Topic 6 Personality factorsI. Affective factors1) Empathy: the process of putting yourself into someone elses shoes, of reaching beyond the self and understanding and feeling what another person is understanding and feeling. In more sophisticated terms empathy is usually describe as the projection o
2、f ones own personality into the personality of another in order to understand him or her better. Empathy is important for communication. It was found that a modified version of the Micro-Momentary Expression test, a test claiming to measure degree of empathy, successfully predicted authenticity of p
3、ronunciation of a foreign language.2) Anxiety: associated with feelings of uneasiness, self-doubt, apprehension or worry. Trait anxiety, at the deepest or global level, is a more permanent predisposition to be anxious. State anxiety, at a more momentary or situational level, is experienced in relati
4、on to some particular event or act. Foreign language anxiety focuses more specifically on the situational nature of state anxiety. Three components of foreign language anxiety have been identified: communication apprehension, arising from learners inability to adequately express mature thoughts or i
5、deas, fear of negative social evaluation, arising from a learners need to make a positive social impression on others, and test anxiety, or apprehension over academic evaluation. The distinction between debilitative and facilitative anxiety is an important insight to be applied to our understanding
6、of anxiety. Some concern some apprehension over a task to be accomplished is a positive factor.3) Introversion / extroversion: the extent to which a person has a deep-seated need to receive ego enhancement, self-esteem, and a sense of wholeness from other people as opposed to receiving that affirmat
7、ion within oneself. It is not clear that extroversion or introversion helps or hinders the process of second language acquisition.4) Self-esteem: the evaluation which the individual makes and customarily maintains with regard to himself; it expresses an attitude of approval or disapproval, and indic
8、ates the extent to which an individual believes himself to be capable, significant, successful and worthy. In short, self-esteem is a personal judgment of worthiness that is expressed in the attitudes that the individual holds towards himself. It is a subjective experience which the individual conve
9、ys to others by verbal reports and other overt expressive behavior. General or global self-esteem is thought to be relatively stable in a mature adult and is resistant to change except by active and extended therapy. Situational or specific self-esteem is a second level of self-esteem, referring to
10、ones appraisals of oneself in certain life situations, such as social interaction, work, education, home, or on certain relatively discretely defined traits, intelligence, communicative ability, athletic ability or personality traits like gregariousness, empathy, and flexibility. The degree of speci
11、fic self-esteem a person varies depending upon the situation or the trait in question. The third level, task self-esteem relates to particular tasks within specific situations.It has been found that all three levels of self-esteem correlated positively with performance on the oral production measure
12、, with the highest correlation occurring between task self-esteem and performance on oral production measure.5) InhibitionInhibition is closely related to and in some cases subsumed under the notion of self-esteem. All human beings, in their understanding of themselves, build sets of defences to pro
13、tect the ego. Some person - those with higher self-esteem and ego strength - are more able to withstand threats to their existence and thus their defences are lower. Those with weaker self-esteem maintain walls of inhibition to protect that is self-perceived to be a weak or fragile ego, or a lack of
14、 self-confidence in a situation or task.Meaningful language acquisition involves some degree of identity conflict as language learners take on a new identity with their newly acquired competence. An adaptive language ego enables learners to lower the inhibitions that may impede success. It was found
15、 in an experiment using small quantities of alcohol to induced temporary states of less than normal inhibition in an experimental group of subjects. The performance of the experimental group on a pronunciation test was significantly better than the performance of a control group. But while alcohol m
16、ay reduce inhibition, it may also affect muscular tension. The physical effect of alcohol may have been a more important factor than the mental effect in accounting for the superior pronunciation performance of the subjects given alcohol.6) Risk-taking: it was claimed that “persons with a high motivation to achieve are moderate, not high risk takers. These individuals like to be in control and like to depend on skill. They do not take wild, frivolous risks or enter into no-win
