The Relationship between Students’ Personality Types and Grammar Teaching and Learning Strategies amongst Iranian ESP Learners

Teaching grammatical points based on the personality types of the students is a very useful teaching strategy which enable students to experience some specific selected way of teaching while learning a subject. This study focused on the ESP students' performance and improvement on learning grammatical structures and patterns more effectively while benefiting from a kind of teaching strategy based on their personality types and strategies when they apply to learn grammatical points. This study is done during an English teaching course in Kish Air and Novin English teaching institutes in Bam.The literature on learning strategies was reviewed to design a questionnaire that would provide data about the employment of strategies while learning and using grammar structures. The questionnaire was administered to ESP classes from the proficiency levels of two institutes in Bam. In addition to the grammar test, the MBTI was administered to the same participants in a separate session to determine the personality profiles of the participants.in the first group, the teacher taught students based on their personality types but in the second group he taught them as usual and he didn’t consider the strategies which his students might apply to learn grammatical points during a session in class.The results at the end of the semester and on the final exam, revealed that 80% of the first group students who benefited from the so called teaching strategy, performed so good on answering to grammatical questions while the students of the second group who had no chance to benefit from this kind of teaching strategy, only 43 % of them, performed rather well on answering grammatical structures in their final exam at the end of the semester.it is also vital to note that the questions on the final exams were completely similar to each other and there was only one teacher who taught these two groups from its beginning till the end of that semester. Most of the first group students voiced that this type of teaching, while using those strategies which are used and applied by students themselves, was more suited to learn high cognitive learning skills and solving real life situation problems, involving less stress while learning the grammatical points or materials. They also mentioned that they are eager to benefit more from this kind of teaching in the next semesters and on other parts of language skills as well.The findings of the present work, shows positive results towards the claim that personality types effect and enhance grammar learning strategies among Iranian ESP learners and it bodes well for extending a kind of language teaching material, with considering the fact that, the findings of the present study are applicable to other subjects in the other institutes and schools to teach a foreign language to ESP students more effective.

کلیدواژه ها:

Personality types ، teaching and learning strategies ، English for Specific Purposes (ESP) students ، grammatical points