Project Background

In 2014, I connected with a group of EFL instructors from Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo (UAEH) in Pachuca, Mexico, at the IMFLIT (International Meeting on Foreign Language Learning in Tandem) held at the University of Miami.

I had implemented teletandem pilots and prototypes with English and EFL teachers at universities in Brazil, Mexico, and Spain, but I was looking for a reliable and routine telecollaboration partner who shared the same overarching mission to continually improve the implementation and effectiveness of virtual language exchanges and provide students with the optimal immersion experiences in the language lab.

Our efforts led to significant contributions to the standardization of best practices in the participating communities of telecollaboration practitioners. We shared our findings at national conferences for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) and the International Association of Language Learning and Technology (IALLT). In 2017, I co-wrote an article in the Moscow University Bulletin on Linguistics and Intercultural Communication [LINK]. In 2020, I co-wrote two book chapters on the findings from the 5-year UAEH-VCU partnership.

The primary methodology I employ to study virtual language exchanges is action research. The research objective is:

1. identify the factors that facilitate and inhibit the implementation of telecollaboration activities;
2. create a pedagogical prototype based on analysis of documented observations and program evaluation data to enhance the quality and effectiveness of telecollaboration activities;
3. streamline and routinize the implementation process;
4. grow and strengthen the program and apply strategies for mitigating technical errors and other common reoccurring problems.  

The project used elements of ethnography and phenomenology to explore a teaching practice that had never existed before. The benefits appear to be self-evident, but it is far more complicated. There are many logistical considerations and concerns.

There is no one-size-fits-all telecollaboration model because all learners have unique needs, interests, and goals. All telecollaboration scenarios and partnerships are inherently different. We redundantly observed and documented the strategies, spaces, and tools used to deliver virtual language exchanges to streamline implementation and improve the outcomes of each interaction.

Pedagogical Objective

To provide structured and unstructured L2 immersion opportunities to domestic language learners by strategically pairing them with strategically selected peer learners with comparable L2 proficiency who study EFL at a university in a country where the L2 is spoken natively.

What is a Teletandem Session?

In a typical 50-minute session, students will speak English during the first 25 minutes and Spanish during the second half of the class. Domestic students collaborate with a language partner abroad, a peer learner, preferably with similar academic interests. The students will complete task-based activities or answer questions about a topic they have prepared in advance.

Activities are generally designed to fill the need for L2 immersion and practice in an authentic setting with a real partner. Strategies are devised to harness the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of teletandem. The collaborating instructors will design pedagogy that enables students to put the language into practice in a meaningful way. Sessions are repeated between 5 and 10 times in a given academic term, which will lead to communicative achievements that can be measured and checked off the ACTFL lists of "can do" statements.

The interactions follow a teletandem script that simulates interactions that reflect the "can do" statements outlined in the ACTFL proficiency guidelines, but not verbatim. Instead, students articulate their ideas and opinions.

Initial Outcomes

My colleagues at Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo (UAEH) and I jointly developed a workflow that routinizes teletandem and enhances the reliability and effectiveness of teletandem program implementation and impact on learning outcomes. The streamlined processes enabled us to continuously coordinate, design, and deliver high-quality tandem programs for large groups of students like the ones pictured in the right-hand column.

The VCU_UAEH teletandem partnership rendered an array of streamlined Teletandem services for instructors of introductory Spanish language courses and other less commonly taught languages (LCTL). Approximately one-third of the instructors teaching a basic Spanish course through the 300 level used Teletandem services to provide immersion opportunities to their students and generally scheduled between two and four sessions per semester. The most significant outcome was routinizing the coordination and implementation of teletandem sessions. 

The Teletandem evaluation questionnaires we retrieved show that students overwhelmingly agree that Teletandem:

• Enhances the language learning experience;
• Heightens foreign language engagement;
• Provides opportunities for authentic immersion and practice;
• Provides domestic students with opportunities to cooperate with learning peers in foreign countries.

Benefits of Housing a Teletandem Program

Other appealing aspects of the design of our model for online exchanges include:

• The sessions and activities are mutually beneficial, so there is little to no cost;
• International cooperation: exchanges are planned in advance;
• The 5 C's are achieved: Communication, Culture, Connections, Comparisons, Communities.
• Institutions can disseminate their name and brand abroad as a by-product of jointly-delivered tandem activities with a foreign institution.
• Heightened international student recruitment
• New opportunities for study abroad

Teletandem Brings New Opportunities to Language Departments

Teletandem pedagogy has virtually unlimited potential when used to craft engaging lab activities such as the ones pictured in the right panel of this webpage. The instructors cooperate online to design and deliver activities jointly. Both groups benefit equally at very little or no cost to the department.

Teletandem can be a catalyst structure for enhancing a school's internationalization goals and creates exciting new possibilities for language departments that other academic and administrative units will find helpful and purposeful.

Recommendations

To enhance the quality and effectiveness of Jointly-delivered teletandem programming, I recommend teachers apply the following strategies or consider alternate solutions for handling these concerns:

• Prepare in Advance
  • Use enhanced communication/ collaboration tools to design and implement the exchanges in a structured format jointly. 
  • Make every effort to match students per L2 proficiency, major, gender preference, and career interests. 
  • Computers should be connected and prepped for tandem activity 15 minutes before the scheduled session;
• During a lab session:
  • Use a mobile texting app like WhatsApp to communicate simultaneously with a tandem teacher abroad while walking around the lab space to verify all sessions are in progress;
  • Ensure that all sessions begin on time;
  • Assign seats so that every student knows where to sit and who their partner will be; having the tandem pairing information handy in print or on a mobile device helps immensely;
  • Ensure that every student always has a partner (create a workflow to deal with unexpected absences);
  • Use backup equipment and develop backup plans to minimize glitches (E.g., For every ten students; have two additional stations connected and ready for tandem;
  • Have a plan for dealing with unexpected absences, pair students without partners, create 2-on1 and 3-on-1 pairings if necessary;
  • Provide students with a printed 1-page handout of learning objectives, links to recommended sites, review relevant grammar structures, create pertinent vocabulary lists, and instructions for tandem activities;
• Reflection
  • Ask students to make a 2 to 3-minute voice recording recounting the experience. Suggestions for improvement.
  • Use a program like VoiceThread to capture and save the recording in a forum where instructors can reply to students and reaccess reflections for evaluation and assessment.

VCU-UAEH Teletandem Partnership

Since 2015, I have worked directly with my teletandem colleagues at UAEH. Through our collaborations since 2014, we developed a unique teaching and research-driven relationship with Maestra Martha Hernández Alvarado (ABD), an aspiring language pedagogy specialist and teaching scholar. Maestra Alvarado teaches English to pre-service EFL teachers in Hidalgo, MX. Our work has directly impacted thousands of students since we began working together.

Ms. Hernández and I began collaborating because we had similar goals and increasingly tight budgets for innovative teaching projects. We wanted to develop our foreign language students, my Spanish language learners, and her EFL students. We experimented with tandem thoroughly for three years and delivered over one hundred sessions. The goal was to enrich our students with tandem experiences through our teaching partnership and work toward the same pedagogical goal of developing a model for optimal teletandem implementation for large groups of students (20 or more).