Finnish Foreign Language Teachers’ Views on Teaching and Study Reality in Their Classes: The KIELO Project’s Rationale and Results

The purpose of this research has been to survey the approaches to foreign language (FL) teaching and studying in Finnish FL classrooms. The central idea was to try to identify the main types of teaching and study activities according to the FL teachers. The survey was conducted as an online questionnaire with the help of the Federation of Foreign Language Teachers in Finland (SUKOL) in 2010. The FL teachers were asked to describe their own teaching and their students’ studying in the classrooms. The questionnaire consist-ed of 115 items with a Likert scale (1–4) and eight open questions. Altogether 147 FL teachers responded to the survey. In this article we highlight the KIELO research project’s rationale, the research methodology and the research findings concerning teaching and study activities the FL teachers see to be most/least common in their classroom, and the differences between context-dependent and context-independent teachers. The implications of these two teaching approaches are discussed.

Index Terms — foreign language teaching, foreign language studying, foreign language classroom, context-dependent teaching, context-independent teaching