‘Personality’ and ‘motivation’ are two important psychological factors which boost up the learner to acquire L2 and reshape our thinking and behavior. Robert Gardner and Wallace Lambert (1972) coined these terms regarding their significant roles in achieving L2.
Personality
Ernest Hilgard (1963) noted that human behavior or learning is determined by his personality. In recent years there has been an increasing awareness of the necessity in second language research and teaching to examine human personality in order to find solutions to perplexing problems.
Motivation
Research over the last three decades has consistently underlined to find out what motivation is along with its important role in successful language learning (Gardner & Lambert 1972, Naiman et al 1978, Oxford & Shearin 1994, Ushioda 1996). Learner's success and failure is very much dependable on the term motivation which is commonly thought of as an inner drive, impulse, emotion or desire that moves one to a particular action. It is refers to the choice of people make as to what experience or goals they will approach or avoid the degree of effort they will exert in that respect(Keller 1983). There are some other factors which are closely related to motivation and these have a combined role to motivate L2 learners. Attitude, age, gender, self esteem, inhibition, risk taking, anxiety, extroversion, syllabus, socio-economical background, talent, and class room factors all these are important variables regarding the factor.
Afroza Akhter Tina
Senior Lecturer
Department of English, DIU
