The Impact of Communicative-Based Activities on Introvert and Extrovert Students’ Speaking Ability

The importance of personality factors and individual difference has caught the attention of researchers in Second Language Leaning for the last decades. This study aimed to explore the impact of communicative-based activities on the speaking performance of introvert and extrovert Iranian EFL learners. Speaking, in this study, is evaluated through measuring grammatical accuracy, fluency, and lexical resources. First, some 32 intermediate EFL learners were chosen by taking a Cambridge IELTS Test. They were all female students with the age range of 18 to 28. In order to collect data, Eysenck Personality Questionnaire was first administered to specify the personality types of students, and the students were divided into one introvert and one extrovert group. Then, an IELTS speaking pretest was held to determine the speaking level of the students. After that, twenty-one successive sessions of treatment started, where interruption activity, memory or story recording, and role playing were used for both introvert and extrovert students. Finally, a posttest identical to the pretest was held to check the possible effects of the treatment. Having analyzed the data through t-tests, the researchers found that the activities were almost equally beneficial for both introverts and extroverts, but they were not in favor of one group significantly. It was also shown that introvert and extrovert students were significantly different from each other in the lexical resources category, where the introverts were better than the extroverts.