A qualitative study on subjective attitudes and objective achievement of autotelic and non-autotelic students of english as a foreign language

Abstract

Csikszentmihalyi (Flow. Harper and Row, New York, 1990), who introduced the concept of autotelic personality, claims that an autotelic individual is the one who performs certain actions for their own sake, rather than in order to achieve some external goals. Moreover, autotelic personalities have a greater ability “to initiate, sustain, and enjoy optimal experiences. The mark of the autotelic personality is the ability to manage a rewarding balance between the ‘play’ of challenge finding and the ‘work’ of skill building. Thus autotelic individuals should enjoy clear advantages in realizing the development of their talents to the fullest extent” (Csikszentmihalyi et al. in Talented teenagers: The roots of success and failure. Cambridge University Press, New York, p. 80, 1993). The present paper seeks to depict the qualitative research on the differences between autotelic and non-autotelic English philology students, namely their subjective attitudes and objective achievements in the process of learning English as a foreign language.