Abstract:
The ways individuals use words can reflect basic psychological processes, including clues to their thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and personality. This paper seeks to determine whether there is a relationship between Iranian EFL learners' writing styles and their personality and gender. It focuses on gender and two key dimensions of personality (Neuroticism and Extroversion), which were assessed using Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (revised version). The concept of formality/contextuality was suggested as the most important dimension of variation between linguistic expressions. An empirical measure of formality, the F-score, was suggested, based on the frequencies of different word classes. Nouns, adjectives, prepositions, and articles are more frequent in formal styles; pronouns, adverbs, verbs and interjections are more frequent in contextual styles. The frequency of positive and negative emotional words was calculated by the program Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. The result shows no significant relationship between these variables. The reason is supposed to be other non- linguistic determinants of formality (e.g. situation and educational level) which may have a stronger effect on EFL writing styles.
Machine summary:
The Journal of Applied Linguistics Vol. 1, No. 3 Autumn 2008 EFL Writing Styles across Personality Traits and Gender: A Case for Iranian Academic Context Biook Behnam Behrooz Azabdaftari Shima Ahmadi Azad Islamic Azad University-Tabriz Branch The ways individuals use words can reflect basic psychological processes, including clues to their thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and personality.
Positive and negative emotional words in personality and gender Psycholinguistic research suggests that emotion words differ from other abstract words in a number of parameters and characteristics and should be treated as a separate group of words, distinct from both concrete and abstract words (Altarriba, Bauer, & Benvenuto, 1999, as cited in Wolfson, 2005).
Table 1 The frequencies of POSs in the data Extroversion Introversion Neuroticism Stable Female Male The frequency of positive and negative emotional words for the texts written by males, females, extroverts, introverts, neurotics, and emotionally stable ones was determined by Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program, available by on-line processing (Pennebaker, & Graybeal, 2001 Results In total, the number of extroverts, introverts, neurotics, and emotionally stable ones are 37, 35, 46, and 37, respectively.
contextuality Contrary to Dewaele and Furnham's (2000) original Implicit- Extrovert Hypothesis which predicted that in spontaneous speech among non-native speakers, high extroverts would use more verbs, adverbs and pronouns, and that low extroverts would use more nouns, adjectives, and prepositions, the results of this study did not show any significant relationship between personality (extroversion and neuroticism) and language (formality vs.