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Why does a person start to learn a new language? Does an early age is more suitable to start doing it? Does motivation affects the process of learning? Is personality an important key in the development of this process? To try answering these questions, I will use two subjects, two different persons from all points of views, starting with age and gender, and ending with their personality.

My first subject is an eighteen years old girl named Raluca. She has been studying English at school from the age of ten, but she has never managed to learn it. Four months ago, she was still unable to speak, read or write in English. The reason is simple: her English teachers were changed very often, most of them with no teaching experience what so ever. Her second language, this L2 that we are talking about, was French. So, English would be for her the third foreign language. In the 4th grade, at the age of ten, Raluca changed schools, being transferred in a class were English was studied from the age of 8. Raluca was supposed to study this new language for her own in order to reach her classmates’ level, thing that she didn’t do because not even the teacher considered English an important subject. She decided to sustain the English exam at the ending of the 12th grade because “I think it is easier than French”. In order to pass this exam, she came for my help.

My second subject is Alin, a twelve years old boy. In the 5th grade, when we first met, his first words were “I hate English and nothing that you’ll ever do will change that”. Raluca and Alin have one thing in common: they both changed schools and were transferred in a class with English as a first second language studied. They both had to reach their classmates level of English. But if Raluca had no interest in doing so, Alin’s parents asked for my help in order for their son to receive better grades at school. When I asked Alin why he hated so much English, he told me: “because the Romanian people started to adapt many English words in our language and this means the loss of our tradition” (an attitude that we will discuss later), and secondly, “English language doesn’t sound well”. He accepted to learn it only because his parents made him to do it.

After this concise description of these two subjects, we can draw a conclusion in terms of motivation and attitude. The attitude towards English language in Raluca and Alin’s case is that of rejection. The difference is the fact that if Alin could give an answer to the question “why?” Raluca could not, and, on the other hand, if Raluca had a real motivation to learn it (to pass the final exam) in Alin’s case the motivation was completely absent.

At this point, we must talk about two initial distinctions: the literature on attitudes and that of motivation that are sometimes close, so we need to be clear how attitude and motivation differ as concepts. An attitude is a set of beliefs and motivation is a reason for doing something. This can be confused because a set of beliefs can be a reason for doing it. So you may be motivated to learn English because your attitude towards English culture, or towards your teacher. It is a common belief that you will not learn English if you dislike the English teacher. There is, however, a small amount of research which suggests that learners can in fact distinguish the messenger from the message. The second distinction is one made in much of motivation literature. It is between integrative and instrumental motivation. The former is related to the desire to learn more about a culture, its language and people – to integrate more within the target language society. The latter relates to achieving some other goals. So if you learn English because you will get a better job if you speak this language, then your motivation is instrumental. In this respect, there is no doubt that Raluca’s motivation is an instrumental one: she wants to learn English language to reach some goals. The literature on motivation states that persons who are instrumentally motivated are more successful in acquiring the second language. Considering the fact that in two months Raluca managed to reach her classmates’ level of English, we can state that instrumental motivation really influences the development of learning a second language.

On the other hand, the lack of motivation in Alin’s case made the process of learning very difficult. It was very hard for him to memorise words or grammar issues. Alin’s memory was something like… everything that you have learned today it will vanish tomorrow. In two months he succeeded to learn how to use only the Present Tense Simple and Continuous, to learn some words, and this only by repeating them with me every time we met.

I want to return now to Alin’s attitude towards English language. As I have said before, when I asked Alin why he hated so much English, he told me: “because the Romanian people started to adapt many English words in our language and this means the loss of our tradition”. For a better understanding of this attitude, I think that it is important to make a distinction between two relevant factors. On the first hand we have ethnocentrism, the belief in the superiority of your own country. On the other hand, anomie, which is a feeling of lack of attachment to it (in some parts of the world, individuals may yearn to be of a different culture, to be living elsewhere). In this case, the former didn’t help much in language learning.

On the other hand, Raluca’s attitude towards English, was at first that of rejection, because she was simply doing English as an “academic exercise”. When she started to understand and, most important, to discover something about the English culture, her attitude suffered a major change. English for her was now something more than a subject matter or a burden. On the whole, attitude, as we found out, may be defined as being enduring, but is accessible to change, and in many languages teaching situations, the teacher is more like an attitude former than an attitude changer.

Having this into account, I would like to answer to another question: why Alin’s attitude towards English didn’t suffer any change? I think that we have to look the answer in the motivation area. As I said at the beginning of this paper, Raluca had a real motivation to learn English – to pass the final exam. On the other hand, in Alin’s case, the motivation is completely absent. He felt like he was obliged to learn English, a subject matter that he hated. Summing up, we can say that attitude and motivation work together and that if we have a rejection attitude but we are motivated, the learning process may be a success. But if both of them are absent, learning may be considered a waste of time.

Equally important for Raluca’s success and Alin’s failure in achieving English language knowledge, is the personality factor. According to Aurel Clinciu’s (2001) theory, Raluca is the strong – well – balanced kind of man. She is a dynamic girl, very fast in talking and actions, with expressive face and expressive gestures. From the Introversion – Extroversion Scale point of view, Raluca belongs to the Extroversion category. A man from this category is a friendly person who seeks for intense sensations and actions on the spur of the moment. He hasn’t the control of his own feelings and he is not introspective.

On the other hand, Alin belongs to the introverted category, being very calm, distant, attached more on things than on humans. You can heart his feelings very easily without knowing it, and this because is a very sensitive kind of guy, who has fear in expressing his ideas, who doesn’t talk so much being afraid to tell something wrong. He is always sad and sober with no friends, afraid of people and very quiet.

Naiman et al (1978) used Eyseneck’s Introversion – Extroversion scale with a large number of peoples, and found no correlation with language learning success. But their informal observations did suggest an advantage at to extroverts. The fact that introverts do not speak so much as extroverts do and that they are afraid of expressing their own ides and to sustain their opinions, is a huge disadvantage in the second language learning. Extrovert students, as Raluca is, are not afraid of expressing themselves in a language that they don’t know so well, because they are not afraid of saying something wrong or to be corrected by the teacher or by their classmates. This courage is an advantage of learning a new language because we learn best especially from our mistakes.

Another important factor that brought the success in Raluca’s case and failure in that of Alin’s, represents the modality used in learning new words. When Raluca reads a new text, she looks the message that the text wants to convey. She is trying to find out the meaning of unknown words from the context. On the other hand, Alin is extremely typical in reading and he wants to know the meaning of each word. He doesn’t have the ability of finding the meaning of the word in the context. He sees the words as separate entities; he wants to learn them by heart but in the end he can’t memorise them. This difference between the two is probably because of their age. At the age of 18, Raluca has the maturity of making connections between the things she already know, and the new things.

I first thought that when you are little you could learn better an L2. But the experience that I had with Raluca and with other persons of Alin’s age, proved me that I was wrong. At the age of eighteen your grown – up mind can make different correlation, giving you the chance to learn that language logically. You don’t see this new language as a separated thing that cannot be linked with something you already know. But I think that most important think is that when you are older you are different motivated to learn a new language, especially instrumentally motivated, thinking more about your future. At the age of twelve, you don’t think so much at these issues and the learning of a new language may become something that it is impose to you.

In this sample essay I wanted to show how motivation, attitude and personality could affect the process of the learning of an L2. Two different subjects, with two different personalities and ages, showed us that these factors can play important roles in achieving new language knowledge. Need online English essay help?