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Various studies have investigated the relation between personality variables and second language acquisition (e.g. Moody, 1988; MacIntyre & Charos, 1996; Dewaele & Furnham, 1999) but the study of personality traits and especially the effect of extraversion on L2 speech production remains somewhat underexplored. This study builds on previous research but is innovative in three ways. Firstly, it examines learners' speech production in two rather than one L2 and thus puts to the test the hypothesis that the effect of extraversion is stable across different target languages (Dewaele & Furnham 2000). Secondly, whereas most previous studies have investigated the effect of extraversion on fluency (e.g. Rossier, 1976; Tapasak, Roodin & Vaught 1978; Busch, 1982; Dewaele, 1998) this study also looks at the potential effect of this variable on the linguistic accuracy and complexity of learners' L2 speech production. Thirdly, whereas previous studies were mostly cross-sectional in design, this study adds a longitudinal perspective by considering to what extent the effect of the extraversion-introversion dimension on the fluency, complexity and accuracy of learners' L2 production remains stable over time. Participants are 25 Dutch-speaking secondary school students learning both English and French as foreign languages in Flanders, Belgium. Oral production data in both L2s were collected on three occasions at six month intervals (spanning grades 8 and 9) by means of a wordless picture-story retell task. Six quantitative measures for fluency, accuracy and complexity were computed for each data set. The Eysenck Personality Questionnaire RSS was used to measure the learners' degree of extraversion (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1991). Pearson correlations and regression analysis with repeated measurements tests of fixed effects were used to measure the effect of extraversion on the learners' L2 production in both languages.
