The Role of Personality Characteristics in Forming EFL University Students' Attitudes towards Learning English as a Foreign Language: A Case Study

The role of attitude as a crucial factor that impacts learners' management and performance of all language skills and activities has formed a focal point of study and interest on the part of the majority of scholars specialized in language teaching, learning, and acquisition. This is so because attitude' through its main three components, namely cognitive, affective and behavioural, uncovers the ways that learners think of the new language, feel of it and behave in doing all its relevancies. The present study is intended to investigate the attitudes of EFL university students towards English language learning. It hypothesizes that there are no differences between the attitudes of male and female university students towards learning English. To bring about the aims and test the hypothesis, a questionnaire has been administered to a randomly selected sample of 96 EFL 2nd year students at the Dept. of English Language, College of Humanities, University of Zakho, Kurdistan Region, Iraq during the second term of the academic year 2016-2017. The quantitative and qualitative data collected by means of the questionnaire reveal that (1) students in the sample have positive attitudes, in terms of the cognitive, affective and behavioral aspects, towards learning English, and (2) there is a statistically significant differences between the male and female students on the basis of gender.