I don't know how many times I've heard (and used!) the phrase "it depends..." to respond to questions concerning second language acquisition. There are so many factors affecting a person's ability to learn a second langauge that it often becomes impossible to make broad generalizations. In this week's reading, the following paragraph from Pierce really stood out to me (actually, I just found her entire article fascinating, but in summary...):
"If learners invest in a second language, they do so with the understanding that they will acquire a wider range of symbolic and material resources [...] The notion of investment attempts to capture the relationship of the language learner to the changing social world [...] The notion presupposes that when language learners speak, they are not only exchanging information with target language speakers but they are constantly organizing and reorganizing a sense of who they are and how they relate to the social world. Thus an investment in the target language is also an investment in a learner's own social identity - an identity that is constantly changing across space and time".
Pierce goes on to say that "a language learner's motivation to speak is mediated by investments that may conflict with the desire to speak", and this is the part of her article that was the most interesting to me. In the examples she cited, and in my real life experience, it is so interesting to me how much language learning is affected by both internal and external motivations, and how language learning suffers with those motivations are in conflict with one another. As she explains, language is so much a part of "self" that it often suffers when "self" suffers and vice versa.
Pierce explains that language is very tied to social identity, and this makes it a very vulnerable aspect of a person's being. We often make associations with certain languages in certain parts of our lives. For example, we may use a particular language in a particular context for for a particular purpose. If that context or purpose becomes insecure or instable, a person's desire to learn and use the language associated with it may decrease or be completely eliminated.
So, back to my original title... it depends. A person may have a stellar constellation (as Norton and Toohey term it) of personality characteristics and language-learning traits and history, but if the language they are learning represents insecurity or inferiority, their desire to continue to learn may be compromised. One cannot make the generalization that, for example, an extroverted person is a good langauge learner (although they may well be, because they may seek out more opportunities to speak) because their loyalty to another power or motivation that they have may conflict with their ability and desire to continue to learn the second language. So, it depends.
[disclaimer: this post was much longer and much better until I hit "post" and it erased it all... sigh.]
I'm taking a spanish phonetics class and even in there we talk about how individual language is. It simply is not possible to generalize most things about language, and this is the same for language acquisition. I like the quote you used from the readings. So much about our language helps form our identity and as SLL's it may be part of the motivation to learn. This cannot be deduced by simply observing someone speak though. You would have to know them as a person, or at least ask. So much cannot be derived solely from person's speech, their intentions and motivations need to be tapped into as well. So I agree with you, it really does depend on each individual aside from generalizations.
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