Abstract

• The purpose of this study is to explore personality traits and attitude towards learning English as a foreign language of students from Sagaing University of Education. The study was conducted as a survey research design and a quantitative method. The participants in this study were 900 students (2019-2020 academic year) from Sagaing University of Education. International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) developed by Goldberg (1999) and Attitudes of Students towards Learning English Language Questionnaire (ALEL) developed by Abidin, Mahammadi & Hanan (2012) were applied in this study. The Cronbach’s alpha of IPIP was 0.863 and that of ALEL was 0.936. By computing crosstabulation, it was found that, the most dominant trait was agreeableness followed by conscientiousness, mix traits, openness and extraversion. Emotional stability emerged to be the least dominant personality traits. Participants had high attitude towards learning English according to affective aspect and low attitude according to behavioral aspect. There were significant differences in students’ attitude towards learning English according to gender and specialization. Females had higher attitude towards learning English than males. Student specializing English Language Teaching had higher attitude towards learning English than student specializing other Subjects. There was no significant difference in students’ attitude towards learning English according to education level although the mean score of fifth year students was slightly higher than that of third year and fourth year students. There was significant difference in students’ attitude towards learning English according to their personality traits. Student with conscientiousness had higher attitude towards learning English than student with other traits. Therefore, teacher needs to understand different personality traits of students so that he can use different teaching methods according to their personality traits so as to develop positive attitudes towards what they are learning.