2 Literature Review

This chapter is structured by three parts; the first part makes a general view of national and international studies on personality; the second part summarizes studies on spoken English from two angles, oral competence and oral language learning; and then an analysis on achievements and limitations of previous researches as well as reasons for those limitations is given in the third part。

2。1 Studies on Personality论文网

2。1。1 Studies on Personality at Home

Researches on the inpidual differences of English learners, among which learners’ personality takes up a big part, are getting a greater appreciation along with the popularization of communicative approaches ( Wang, 2000 )。 Song ( 1994: 322 ) regards personality as a stable as well as changeable mental feature of one’s reaction to facts and behaviors。 Wang ( 1990 ) finds that a number of teachers focus more on the combination of teaching and students’ characters。 More statistically, Rod Ellis ( 1994 ) discussed the importance of personality through using it as a way to judge the input in SLA and he finds that there remains two arguments in stark contrast on the interrelation between personality and SLA Since personality is a complicated factor which is hard to observe, the interrelation between personality and foreign language study remains ambiguous。 So far, most of the researches generally focus on the effects on comprehensive English skills, while few narrows down onto influence on specific English skills such as spoken English, writing or so。Research ( Tang & Chen, 2003 ) reports that introversion benefits comprehensive skills and extroversion language intake; hence, pedagogical implication should try to take use of the advantages of these two personalities and get rid of the disadvantages。 Liang ( 2004 ) finds that different personalities form different learning habits, making out distanced SLA output by the means of specifying those personality types。 Dong ( 2013 ) also calls for pedagogical practice related to various kinds of the students’ personalities in the language learning process。 He ( 2006 ) regards personality as one of the nonintellectual factors influencing SLA, and points out that extroversion is better at language intake than introversion, which is also suggested by Brown ( 2001), an extrovert person is especially well suited to second language leaning．

2。1。2 Studies on Personality Abroad

International scholars lay more emphasis on the research approaches to analyze the relation between spoken English and personality。 For instance, Chastain ( 1975 ) employs Marlowe-Crowne scale testing American students who learn French, German and Spanish in order to make an analysis on the impact of extroversion and introversion and gives that the extroverted is good at coming in forefront。 Rossier ( 1976 ) makes a research on the fluency of spoken English observed by Eysenck’s Personality Inventory, finding that fluency has something to do with the learners’ personalities。 Naiman ( 1975 ) regards that extroversion and advantage over conversation have no apparent relation to language competence through a research targeting younger students who study French as an additional major。 From various elements of personality, the research outcomes vary from one to another。 文献综述

2。2 Studies on Spoken English

Recent years witness the efforts and achievements of researches on spoken English by a lot of second language acquisition researchers。 He and Yang ( 2003 ) discuss the factors concerning the oral English development and find that different from previous studies, the correlation of personality and oral competence is weak, which is worth further discussion。 Zhang ( 2004 ) explains that learners’ motivation is closely related to the improvement of spoken English and also gives some pedagogical implications。 In addition, in another research ( Tang, 2005 ), 161 non-English majors of a Guangdong university are investigated by means of interview and questionnaire, the findings of which provide an insight into the main motivation factors。