Personality Type and Learners’ Performance in Reading Comprehension

Abstract: This study is an attempt to find the relationship between personality type of the learners and their performance on reading comprehension tests of two structurally different texts, i.e. narrative and cause/effect. To detect the relationship, a researcher-made reading comprehension comprising eight passages of both text structures and the Persian version of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator were administered to a group of 379 BA English students from different Iranian universities. The collected data were analyzed and the results indicated that the distribution of subjects' scores on both tests were not normal. Therefore, two Kruskal-Wallis tests were run to detect the relationship. The results of the Kruskal-Wallis tests showed no difference between the subjects' performance on both tests. In order to find out if any specific personality type group had performed better on one of the tests, eight paired sample T-tests were run. The results indicated that compared to the cause/effect mean scores, all groups had performed better on the narrative test, but the difference between the mean scores of STJ, SFJ, SFP, and NFP personality groups were significant. Therefore, it was concluded that the inclusion of most of the feeling subjects, who possess certain personality characteristics congruent with narrative textual features, in these four categories has assisted their better performance. Drawing on the results of the study, implications of the results are suggested.