Welcome to our study on cross-cultural motivation in education settings
There’s growing interest on how the way that educators speak in the classroom affects children’s motivation, well-being, and learning outcomes. So far, the literature has focused on researching just a few languages (most often English, German, or Dutch). We aim to change this by inviting teachers from all over the world to contribute to our study.
To this aim, we are currently recording voice samples from teachers in different countries who are willing to volunteer their precious time to our project. Specifically, we ask teachers and those who train to be teachers to intone a number of different materials in different tones of voice. We do not want to be prescriptive in how we think an utterance such as “pick up your coat” should be intoned. Rather, we are trying to establish how real teachers intone such instructions in their own language guided by their own cultural display norms. We aim to analyse their voice samples acoustically to describe an acoustic profile for the different voices that we are interested in. Finally, we are hoping to continue our work by using some of these materials in further studies to test for their effectiveness.
If you are interested in participating, and have not yet received specific instructions, please contact Prof. Silke Paulmann from the Department of Psychology at the University of Essex. She will send you detailed instructions on what we are looking for.