Transitioning to the university environment is a milestone in an individual's life path. This milestone is often a symbol of a new beginning and change from controlled education at secondary school, where the responsibility for education is mainly in the hands of teachers, to a university environment, where the student is an active agent of his/her education (Vengřinová, 2022). A new environment can be confusing for beginning students (Hassel & Ridout, 2018; Kálmán, 2020), but simultaneously it brings the opportunity to explore the unknown, learn new things and become independent (Aristeidou, 2021; Parker et al., 2004). All this happens during the process of integration first described by Spady and Tinto in the 1970s. Tinto (1975) divided the integration of the higher education system into integration into two spheres: academic and social spheres. Both of these spheres are interconnected.
In the last ten years, a large heterogeneous group of students (MSMT, n.d.) has been attending universities in the Czech Republic, symbolising the universal phase of Czech higher education (Prudky et al., 2010). Each student has a specific background: SES, culture capital, individual attributes, and family background;... Tinto (1975) says that integration into studies is influenced by three essential factors: pre-college schooling, individual attributes and family background. In the current research, the authors analyse the third factor and how family background influences the integration process. The result of the research is that first-generation students have more difficult entry into studies in terms of integration into the tertiary educational level than non-first-generation students (Dika & D'Amico, 2016; Ives & Montoya, 2020). First-generation students represent those students who are the first in their families to have a chance to earn a college degree (Petty, 2014), which means that they come to college from families with lower educational backgrounds (Gibbons & Woodvide, 2014). Members of these families are used to helping each other and have closer family ties. They, therefore, tend to increase the frequency of communication and control over the newcomer student. However, this leads to the fact that it is more challenging for the student to break away from the family culture and integrate into a new environment (Arch & Gilman, 2019). At a time when students of Czech colleges were forced to stay at home (due to the covid-19 pandemic) and study online, the possibility of social integration was limited. Social integration is necessary for academic integration, during which the student becomes familiar with the demands of going through the study, study engagement starts, and starts to accept his/her new social role: student. During the first semester of 2020/2021, when online teaching was mandated, beginning first-generation students could not turn to their peers when looking for help with questions related to the academic sphere because they did not know their peers. They also could not turn to their family members, with whom they spent most of their time, as they had no experience with the university environment. Therefore, their teachers became their crucial source of information. Research by Hassel and Ridout (2018) and Le et al. (2010) emphasise the importance of students' contact with college teachers and the role they play for beginning students in learning a new educational environment. This paper aims to answer the following questions: (1) How do beginning first-generation students describe the role of their teachers in the process of academic integration into online studies? (2) What beginning first-generation students perceive to have been (in)effective on the part of teachers towards their academic integration.

Following the questions, a qualitative investigation was carried out. It was conducted two wawes of semi-structured interviews with 20 interviewees. During the first wave of interviews, the students were informed about the overall purpose and goal of the research. They were also informed about the plan of two interviews per person. The first wave of interviews took place in the second semester of the informants' study, and the second was conducted in their fourth semester. A different interview template was created for each wave of interviews. The entire data corpus thus amounts to 40 interviews transcribed word-for-word, anonymised and analysed. The analysis was carried out using the method of critical discourse analysis (CDA). CDA provides knowledge about specific phenomena in the social world (its understanding, structure and behaviour of actors), and it is ideal for working with a large number of interviews (Zábrodská & Petrjánošová, 2013). The initial step (1) was familiarisation with the data corpus, followed by (2) the selection of a section for analysis in connection with the discourse: the relationship between the teacher and the student during the academic integration into the study period, then I proceeded to (3) the analysis of the discursive practice. The immediate context in which the discourse is formed was key. The final step was (4) the analysis of social practice, which brings us a broader knowledge of the socio-cultural context, which helps shape the given discourse (Meyer, 2001; van Dijk, 2015).

The results show that first-generation students perceived their university teachers as key bearers of know-how at the time of their process of integration into their studies.At that time, they were beginning students who needed to orient themselves in a new environment to discover if and how the teaching would take place,what demands were made for progressing through the studies and how they could meet these demands.However, in the online environment,they needed the opportunity to stop the teacher when leaving the classroom and ask them for the necessary information.Such a space had to be specially created by the teachers.If the teacher communicated and helped meet the needs of the students, he became a guide for them in their integration into the university system.The academic worker thus found himself in a triple role: teacher-researcher-guide through academic integration.Based on the data analysis, it is possible to identify the phases and the effective way the college teacher guided the students and helped them during the integration into the study. In the first phase, interviewees needed an answer to the question, "What awaits them?".In the second, "How to understand the requirements placed on them" and "How to meet these requirements?".A specially created space where students can a) ask teachers questions: the teacher sets aside a particular time in the online room to ask questions.Alternatively, students can b) discuss: the teacher sets aside time in the online space for so-called "debates after the class".Both options are effective strategies from the students' point of view.Students could not only ask the teacher questions, but at the same time, they were supported by the teachers in the debate part to train academic language through argumentation).On the contrary, the informants perceived it as ineffective if the teacher created a space for potential social and academic integration between students and left them alone.

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