Mrs Ana Korzun

Profile

I started teaching EAL (English as an Additional Language) in summer Language Schools in Scarborough and Whitby while I was doing a BA degree in English Philology. I wanted to be an English teacher since approximately the age of six, and I never changed my career plans since then. I started learning English myself when I was in Year 2 in my local primary school, and then I gradually started taking part in various International projects at school and with the European Union and soon made many international friends which helped me a lot to develop better English skills.

I grew up in Lithuania in a Russian speaking family and then partially moved to Norway at the age of fifteen, commuting between Lithuania, Russia and Norway on a regular basis, so this gave me a good flavour of cross-cultural experience and taught me a lot about various cultural differences and rich cultural diversities.

I moved to the UK in 2009 and continued my cross-cultural journey, working as an Ethnic Minorities assistant one secondary school in Huddersfield, and then as an EAL teacher at a private school near York. I completed my BA in EAL and Education at the University of Leeds in 2015, investigating and advocating the importance of continuous development and utilisation of learner’s first language when learning a second language. And today, I am doing my PhD concentrating on political and social dimensions of adult migrants, their motives, motivation and attitudes to language learning.

Research interests

My PhD is focusing on political and social dimensions of adult migrants, their motives, motivation and attitudes to language learning. I am going to apply mixed research methods whilst primarily conducting an ethnographic study, recording the experiences that adult migrants have when arriving to the UK and how these experiences affect their language learning choices. 

Qualifications

• MA in EAL and Education (University of Leeds, 2015)
• BA in English Philology (LCC International University, 2009)