The teacher's speech in class forms an important part of the teacher's teaching style and directly reflects their approach to teaching, and fundamentally influences the success of students' learning. Therefore, part of a teacher's daily work should also include self-reflection and self-evaluation of what and how they say in class and how it contributes to the acquisition of the subject matter by their students. Research conducted in the field of teacher's speech in a traditional face-to-face class consistently points to a significant disproportion between the amount of teacher's and student's talk in class, where teachers talk dominates in a ratio of almost 70% to 30% of the total class time. When teaching a foreign language, it is particularly important to monitor the teacher's talk, since students' communicative competence is developed primarily through communication. However, foreign language teachers seem to forget this thesis.

The global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020–2022 caused the shift of teaching from the traditional classroom to the virtual environment, and one of the challenges this change brought was the question of how to achieve the highest possible active participation of students in online lessons. Our research therefore examined the issue of English language teachers' talk in online teaching through self-reflection and self-evaluation of teachers and subsequent feedback interviews with them.

One of the partial goals of the research was to identify a set of teachers’ verbal practices that limit foreign language acquisition in the school environment. Through self-reflection and self-evaluation of the participating teachers, we investigated which areas of their talk in class they identify as appropriate and which they consider problematic.

Our research sample consisted of a group of five English language teachers from lower and upper secondary schools in western and central Slovakia. We achieved homogeneity of the sample by selecting qualified teachers with a minimum of 5 years of teaching experience who taught the same foreign language through e-learning platforms and worked with groups of students of intermediate language proficiency level. Diversity of the research sample was ensured by including teachers from different types of schools, whose students varied in age.

From a methodological point of view, we chose qualitative, empirical research, and from the research designs we chose a collective (multiple) case study. For data collection, we used full transcripts of audio recordings of online lessons, self-assessment sheets of teachers involved in the research, and full transcripts of audio recordings of semi-structured interviews with teachers. For the analysis of the collected material, we compiled a system of categories according to which we sorted the data.

The validity of our research is ensured by a detailed description of the researcher's procedure in analyzing the collected data, as well as by citing quotes from audio recordings, self-assessment sheets and semi-structured interviews. These helped us to identify the specific characteristics of different categories and point out the differences between them. In order to increase the validity of the research, we used triangulation of research methods (observation, self-assessment sheets, interviews), to expand scope and ensure a diversity of perspectives on the researched issue, and understand the studied phenomena in greater depth and breadth.

Keywords: Self-reflection, self-evaluation, teacher talk, feedback, online teaching, foreign language teaching.