Educational research in the Czech Republic in the past tended to concentrate on investigating the inputs (predispositions, attitudes) and outcomes (test results, acquired knowledge) of education, or the context and media (curricular documents, textbooks). Exploring the complex process of teaching itself was not carried out so often. The aim of this paper is to introduce the design, methodology and results of the research project CPV Video Study of English, which aims at analysing the process of teaching English as a foreign language in the Czech primary as well as lower-secondary schools, and which is being carried out at the Educational Research Centre (Centrum pedagogického výzkumu – hence CPV) at the Faculty of Education, Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic.
We base our research on the assumption that accent on communicativeness remains an important aspect of foreign language teaching in the Euro-American region at the beginning of the 21st century (cf. Council of Europe, 2001). 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). 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). The recommended procedures differ considerably from earlier practice in the language classrooms, where teachers preferred accuracy to fluency and thus most of the learners´ output was controlled. Another key issue in the communicative paradigm is the use of mother tongue. 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 at Czech schools.
As we want to analyse the teaching process in its complexity, two dimensions of aspects were analysed. On the one hand, general aspects of every lesson that concern the organisation of teaching, temporal development and verbal realisation; on the other hand a variety of subject-specific aspects can be observed in every English lesson. The two dimensions therefore are: A) general didactic aspects: these include: opportunities to talk, classroom management and lesson phases (see Janík, Miková, Najvar, Najvarová, 2006). B) subject-specific aspects: these include the use of mother tongue in the foreign-language classroom, using authentic materials in the classroom, the nature of pupils’ utterances etc.
The research sample enables us to compare teaching practices on two levels of the Czech educational school system – the primary level and the lower-secondary level, it allows us to look for similarities and differences of the instruction in individual teachers and the two school levels. It is also an opportunity to seek indicators of quality in the instruction of English as a foreign language.

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