Rachel is Head of Essential Skills at Woking College and Kate is an ESOL teacher. We both felt that personality and vocabulary learning in ESOL would be a useful area to explore.
Kate
introduces herself and how she came to be interested in this topic in
the video below (click on the image). The CELTA course which she mentions is the initial
teacher training course for ESOL teachers.
Kate adds:
Kate referred to Susan Cain and how reading her book "Quiet" was very influential for her. You can watch Susan Cain talking about the Power of Introverts here:
Rachel gives her perspective on the project:
"Obviously to undertake the project as a personal crusade with no evidence behind it would have been foolhardy. After initial discussions with Rachel, we then spoke to the other ESOL teachers at Woking College and gathered their experiences of teaching quieter students, to see if they had had similar experiences to mine. We also started to look at the literature to get a feel for the scientific theories around personality and temperament. As a consequence of this further exploration, we felt that this would be a fruitful area to explore, which led us on to design and implement this project."
Kate referred to Susan Cain and how reading her book "Quiet" was very influential for her. You can watch Susan Cain talking about the Power of Introverts here:
Rachel gives her perspective on the project:
"The idea of collaborating together to look at the link between introversion/extraversion and language learning activities intrigued me as it is an area which I had briefly thought about but never had time to examine in depth; I felt that if there was a link between them, then this knowledge could be valuable for both teachers and learners. Kate's grounding in quantitative research, and my experience in more qualitative research complemented each other and the design of the project reflected this."
