Even though the questionnaire reached approximately 5000 teachers, altogether 182 colleagues filled it in. The reason for the low return rate might be attributed to either the length of the questionnaire (it took 20-25 minutes to fill it in), or to the inopportune period it was distributed (at the end of the school year), or to the topic of the questionnaire. Some comments left on the questionnaire (or below the questionnaire on social media) and a hateful email I received after sending out the call for participation led me to the conclusion that some teachers found the topic of the questionnaire too contentious and interpreted it as “liberal propaganda”, thus decided not to participate in it at all. The participants, however, did turn out to be diverse, therefore the actions taken to recruit participants were successful. The respondents were all Hungarian EFL teachers (24 male, 157 female and 1 person did not indicate their gender), aged between 24 and 66 (M = 46.85, SD = 10.23) with a mean of 21.07 (SD = 11.03) years of teaching experience. To make comparison possible based on age, the participating teachers were put into three age groups: group 1 (n = 28) comprised of teachers under the age of 35, group 2 (n = 76) of teachers between the age of 35 and 50, and group 3 (n = 78) of teachers over the age of 50. The uneven distribution of the teachers into the groups did not pose any problems in the statistics, and it also reflects the realities of the aging teacher society in Hungary.

 

The participants were also asked about what other roles they have in their schools apart from teaching English. Slightly more than two-thirds of the participants (n = 130) claimed that they had extra roles in their schools besides teaching English, such as being head teachers, coordinating projects, being responsible for students’ volunteering service, or being teacher team leaders. They were also asked whether they play any public roles in society, and only 6.6% (n = 12) claimed that they do. Finally, they were asked whether they had received any training about teaching global, local, or intercultural issues, and only 24.7% (n = 45) responded that they had.