The poster presents the findings of an analysis carried out within the project CPV Video Study of English. The analysis aimed to investigate the language spoken in Czech lower-secondary classrooms of English as a second language. Namely the analysis aimed at the proportion of Czech language to English spoken in Czech classrooms of English as a foreign language. At the beginning of the 21^st century, accent on communicativeness remains an important aspect of foreign language teaching in the Euro-American region (cf. Common European Framework of Reference, 2001). Within the communicative approach, the teacher is responsible for creating opportunities for the learners to practise communication in the language classroom in the situations that evoke real-life communicative needs (Brumfit, 1992; Littlewood, 1994; Widdowson, 1978). Employing the target language where possible and the mother tongue only where necessary has been practically indisputable since the 1980s (Atkinson, 1987). The question remains to what degree these recommendations are actually reflected in everyday foreign language teaching. There have been research projects that aimed to answer this question (e.g. Duff & Polio, 1990), yet this question is one that needs to be asked repeatedly to understand the progress in time. This poster presents an analysis of the nature of pupils’ utterances made in 79 lessons of the everyday teaching in the lower secondary school in the Czech Republic. The analysis is a part of a broader project (CPV Video Study of English) carried out by the Educational Research Centre of the Faculty of Education, Masaryk University, Czech Republic (Najvar et al., 2009) that employed video study as a research approach. Analyses within the project were based on the concept of opportunities to talk. Opportunities to talk are seen as one of the variables that influence the quality of ELT instruction and are accessible for research. Opportunities to learn enable learners to become active in the process of their learning (Seidel & Prenzel, 2006) and they are seen as allocated time (also engaged time, active learning time, time-on-task) the learner has for the task (Wiley & Harnischfeger, 1974). Various operationalisations were employed for dealing with the proportion of English versus Czech spoken in the classrooms, e g. the time devoted to speaking (measured in 10-sec intervals) or the number of words spoken (spoken by the teacher and the pupils in English and Czech). The findings indicate that the mother tongue plays an important role in the everyday teaching of English in Czech lower-secondary schools. Typical purposes of using the mother tongue in an English classroom are also analysed.

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