Sex and personality differences in French and German performance in British secondary school pupils

An experiment was performed to investigate the relationship between sex, personality and learning style and French and German performance in secondary school pupils. 432 13–14 year old children (216 boys and 216 girls) whose mother tongue was English were given the Junior Eysenck Personality Inventory and Raven's Standard Matrices. Half of the subjects were then given three performance tests (comprehension, essay and prose translation), and the rest received three parallel German tests. The main findings were that, although pupils studied each language for the same time, German was easier than French, girls did better than boys, and that language performance increased with extraversion. The results were discussed in terms of their practical implications.