The aim of this paper is to identify the factors influencing efficiency of urban public transport (UPT) systems and to benchmark Czech UPT systems according to their efficiency. Methods: The analysis was carried out on a sample of 19 UPT systems in the Czech Republic during 2010-2015. Efficiency was evaluated through a two-stage analysis. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) was used in the first stage. It was based on three inputs (employees, rolling stock and energy) and one output (passengers). DEA efficiency scores were computed for all 19 systems for each year and under two different assumptions regarding returns to scale. In the second stage of the analysis, DEA scores were used in Tobit regression with a set of operational, socioeconomic , and demographic explanatory variables in order to find determinants of efficiency. Results: Several variables were identified as factors increasing efficiency-proportion of drivers, average vehicle age, the presence of tramlines in the city, total vehicle kilometres, and population density. Some variables were identified as decreasing efficiencyticket price, proportion of subsidies in revenues, and presence of a two-city system. Czech cities with most efficient transport systems were Prague, Brno, Mariánské Lázně, Olomouc, and Pilsen. The least efficient cities were Chomutov-Jirkov, Ostrava, and Děčín. Conclusions: The principal lesson from this study is that bigger cities with greater population densities are more efficient than smaller cities, and the key efficiency factors that local authorities have under their control are the ticket price, rate of subsidies, and structure of the city transport system. The paper contributes to current debate about the efficiency of the urban transport systems and their determinants. There was not much difference between the constant and variable returns to scale results. The results from the second stage could help policy makers make the public transport systems more efficient. Future research could be devoted to gaining data on additional operators which would also enable using additional inputs and outputs for DEA analysis.

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The paper presents the research study of academic writing of Czech university students in an English Language Teacher Education study program. The authors apply an interdisciplinary approach integrating the perspectives of linguistics and language pedagogy in the evaluation of the design of the Academic Writing course and its impact on the development of students’ academic writing skills. Adopting a process genre approach (Badger, White, 2000) to writing instruction as a key design principle, our study combines the genre analysis framework (Swales, 1990) and the intercultural rhetoric perspective (Connor, 2004) to design an innovated academic writing course for graduate students focusing on developing critical thinking skills and context-aware writing. The course, informed by an analysis of the academic writing needs of the students, aimed at familiarizing them with the rhetorical structure of academic texts with a focus on the genre of the Master’s thesis and at introducing them to the academic writing conventions in the area of soft sciences. Piloted in 2019, the course was implemented as a blended course, where the contact sessions were complemented by online support in VLE Moodle. Apart from analyses of written texts, classroom writing, and homework tasks, it also included discourse editing tasks and peerreviewing with peer-reviewer feedback and teacher feedback. We believe that our research findings will shed light on the potential of academic writing courses based on the process-genre approach to contribute to the enhancement of the quality of English academic texts by non-native academic writers, and specifically Czech graduate students.

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