Over the last few decades, the field of education has been strongly influenced by the worldwide processes of globalization and internationalization. This development has naturally resulted in increasing attention to language learning and teaching, particularly in English language. Meaningful and efficient learning has become one of the essential goals of contemporary education and therefore the choice of the most appropriate and efficient language teaching methods is nowadays considered a crucial question.

Pedagogical translation used to be an essential part of language teaching but, with the rise of direct methodologies and communicative approaches to language teaching, pedagogical translation was excluded from language learning and teaching because it was regarded as an old-fashioned method which did not have its place in modern classrooms. However, nowadays there are many authors (e.g. Widdowson, 1978; Ur, 2006; Cook, 2010) who advocate the return of pedagogical translation into contemporary language learning. Modern pedagogical translation is considered a useful tool which can help learners to develop their language skills and expand their knowledge of a foreign language. Nonetheless the lack of complex empirical research and contemporary studies raises the question about the real positive and negative influences of pedagogical translation on learners’ knowledge and their language skills in a foreign language.

This pre-research study forms part of complex research on the use of pedagogical translation in English language teaching and its influence on the development of learners’ language skills. The pre-research study focuses on teachers’ attitudes towards pedagogical translation in English language teaching. As we are strongly convinced that an analysis of teachers’ experience and opinions regarding pedagogical translation would reveal teachers’ real beliefs, and their foundations, and subsequent implications for their actual teaching, we consider the present pre-research study as an imperative part of the whole research.

The pre-research was designed to answer the following questions: What are teachers’ beliefs about pedagogical translation in English language teaching? What are the implications of these beliefs for their actual teaching? In other words, the study was designed to determine (1) the beliefs of the English language teachers about the usage of pedagogical translation in English language teaching; (2) their opinion on how the usage of pedagogical translation influences learners’ language skills; (3) how the teachers’ attitude towards pedagogical translation is reflected in their actual teaching.

The research was carried out in the Czech Republic and it investigated the beliefs of secondary school teachers. Even though the data were collected in the Czech Republic, we believe that they are not country-specific.

Atkinson, D. (1987). The mother tongue in the classroom: a neglected resource? ELT Journal, 41(4), 241-247. Chang, S. (2011). A Contrastive Study of Grammar Translation Method and Communicative Approach in Teaching English Grammar. English Language Teaching, 4(2), 13-24. Choděra, R., Ries, L. (1999). Výuka cizích jazyků na prahu nového století. Ostrava: Ostravská univerzita – Pedagogická fakulta. Cook, G. (2012). Translation in Language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chmelařová, L. (2010). Didaktická funkce překladu ve výuce anglického jazyka. Disertační práce (Ph.D.). Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, Pedagogická fakulta. Duff, A. (1989). Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hendrich, J. et al. (1988). Didaktika cizích jazyků. Praha: Státní pedagogické nakladatelství. Kumaravadivelu, B. (2008). Understanding language teaching: from method to postmethod. New Jersey: Taylor & Francis e-Library. Liao, P. (2006). EFL learners‘ beliefs about and strategy use of translation in English learning. RELC Journal, 37(2), 191-215. Leonardi, V. (2010). The Role of Pedagogical Translation in Second Language Acquisition: From Theory to Practice. Bern: Peter Lang. Nazary, M. (2008). The role of L1 in L2 acquisition: attitudes of Iranian university students. Novitas-ROYAL, 2(2), 138-153 Němec, M. (2010). Didaktický potenciál překladu ve výuce angličtiny. In: V. Janíková; S. Hanušová, et al., Cizí jazyky ve výzkumu (pp. 69-83). Brno: Masarykova univerzita. Siddiek, A. G. (2010). The Impact of Translation on Language Acquisition and Knowledge Transfer in the Arab World. European Journal of Social Sciences, 16(4), 565-576. Stern, H. H. (1991). Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ur, P. (2006). A course in language teaching : practice and theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Widdowson, H. (1978). Teaching language as communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weschler, R. (1997). Uses of Japanese (L1) in the English Classroom: Introducing the Functional-Translation Method. The Internet TESL Journal, 3(11). Retrieved from .