Extraverts

The difference between introverted and extraverted personality types can, perhaps be summed up by the following cartoon:


Jung (1921, p417) says of the extravert that "his entire consciousness looks outward to the world."  Mark Vernon expands on this view of extraverts:
They need to join in, be with it and make a show of themselves. They have a deep capacity not just to endure noise and bustle but actually to enjoy it.  They will have wide circles of friends and acquaintances...Their character is more likely to be optimistic and positive and they will regard introspection as unsound.
Cain (2012, p11) adds that "Extroverts tend to tackle assignments quickly.  They make fast (sometimes rash) decisions, and are comfortable multitasking and risk-taking."  This may represent a certain advantage when learning a second language:
They [extraverts] benefit from having superior speaking skills. Extroverts are curious and social. This means that they want to be involved in conversation and because of this will take every opportunity to speak. Introverts on the other hand, are nonplussed about conversation, unless they find the topic interesting. It’s very easy for an introvert to hang back and listen, which means that they don’t make the most of their opportunities to speak the language they are learning (Joddle, 2015).

Extraverts are broadly correlated with Kagan's low-reactives, and so tend to become easily bored and disengaged without sufficient stimulation, unlike introverts who can quickly become overstimulated.  Cain (2012, p124) describes this phenomenon with reference to a study (Geen, 1984) in which participants had to play a challenging word game whilst listening to random bursts of noise through headphones:
When the introverts were asked to work at the noise level preferred by the extraverts, and vice versa, everything changed.  Not only were the introverts over-aroused by the loud noise, but they also underperformed ... The opposite was true for the extraverts - they were under-aroused (and possibly bored) by the quieter conditions.

For the purposes of this study, we classified students on a spectrum from strongly introvert to strongly extravert in order to gain a very broad picture of whether any one personality type performed better in particular types of vocabulary learning task. Of the 27 students who participated in the study, 10 self identified as towards the extravert end of the spectrum.  Of these, 5 were slightly extravert, 3 extravert and 2 very extravert.


10 of the participants in the study self-identified as extravert

In terms of this piece of research and the characteristics of extraverts and low-reactives described above, we expected that the extraverts might express a preference for working in groups and also hypothesized that they would perform better when studying in a more lively and stimulating environment.

Results

We had expected extraverts to perform best when working in groups, but when we compared the mean percentage scores for each personality type (for students who were present for all four lessons) we found this was not the case.  extraverts performed relatively well in the post-tests for both working alone and pairwork but in each case failed to retain the language well.  In terms of the groupwork activity, the extraverts performed the worst out of the three personality types, but the decline in their performance between the post-test and end of term test was less marked.


Extraverts performed relatively poorly in the groupwork exercise


An extravert commenting on the "working alone" activity on the student questionnaire found the exercise not at all helpful because "all people don't talk to me."  Another extravert commenting on the groupwork exercise said "It's good learn new words and it's funny to try to remember with other persons on class."

One possible explanation for the slightly unexpected results is that the test methodology (work on your own and fill in the words that you remember) actually favoured the introverts, who would be expected to perform well in this situation.  For an extravert, it might simply be too lacking in stimulation, and lead to underperformance as seems to have been the case here.  

In terms of enjoyment of the various ways of working, extraverts seemed to be generally less enthusiastic than introverts which was surprising.  Pairwork was marginally the most popular activity with working alone and groupwork ranked equally.  An extravert student commented about pairwork that "we did it together so could help each other" and reported enjoying the activity a lot.



Extraverts seemed to prefer pairwork over other forms of activity

Again, the means of data collection may account for some of the lack of enthusiasm expressed by the extraverts.  They were required to fill in a questionnaire with space for some open responses.  Perhaps if they had been invited to give an immediate, spoken reaction, the results obtained might have been different.

Watch  Oguinei, who is more extravert, talking about how he prefers working in groups.