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 consisted
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.