Abstract:
Norton’s (1995) Investment Hypothesis in L2 learning, that L2
learners who cherish and foresee a richer personality for
themselves in their L2 context would thrive more diligently
and consequently would both enrich their personality and
achieve a higher proficiency in their new language, was
investigated in this study in the community of Iranian EFL
students. The integration and mutual role between language
and culture and their subsequent influence on the personality
and EFL proficiency of 72 Iranian MA EFL students at
Allameh Tabataba’i University were investigated. Personality
features, confined to Multicultural Personality Traits (cultural
empathy, open-mindedness, social initiative, emotional
stability, and flexibility), were measured by using
Multicultural Personality Questionnaire (MPQ) and an actual
TOEFL was used to measure the participants’ EFL
proficiency. Then the relationships between their MPTs and
EFL proficiency were analyzed. It was found that when all
participants were taken as EFL students, the correlation
between their MPTs and EFL proficiency was not a high
correlation, but when they were relatively classified into high,
mid and low-proficiency groups, strong positive correlation
between high-proficiency EFL students’ MPTs and their EFL
proficiency was witnessed (r = .62), whereas the lowproficiency
EFL students’ data indicated a very low
correlation. The findings of this study confirmed the
hypothesis that EFL students with a greater investment in
their L2 as a means to develop an enriched personality had
also achieved higher EFL proficiency.
Machine summary:
com Abstract Norton’s (1995) Investment Hypothesis in L2 learning, that L2 learners who cherish and foresee a richer personality for themselves in their L2 context would thrive more diligently and consequently would both enrich their personality and achieve a higher proficiency in their new language, was investigated in this study in the community of Iranian EFL students.
Personality features, confined to Multicultural Personality Traits (cultural empathy, open-mindedness, social initiative, emotional stability, and flexibility), were measured by using Multicultural Personality Questionnaire (MPQ) and an actual TOEFL was used to measure the participants’ EFL proficiency.
The findings of this study confirmed the hypothesis that EFL students with a greater investment in their L2 as a means to develop an enriched personality had also achieved higher EFL proficiency.
But Investment Hypothesis in L2 learning identifies L2 learners as a social being with an active role in the materialization of an enriched identity in the context of the new language.
L2 learners who have made an investment in their L2 learning in terms of identity development strive to gain the perfect status of a member of their L2 discourse community.
The construction of identity by means of L2 learning, in terms of cultural personality features, has not been investigated in the Iranian EFL graduate context.
The existence of high correlations between MPTs and three of its subcomponents (Op, ES, and FL) in the HP EFL students but no such correlations in LP group can be interpreted as HP Group’s greater investment in EFL as a means of developing an enriched personal identity in these three fields.