Teletandem between French and Brazilian students: Some preliminary remarks

Abstract

In its French-Brazilian version, the Teletandem Brazil project enables students from the University of Lille 3 (France) and from the State University of São Paulo (Unesp, Brazil), to take part in online exchanges, based on the principles of autonomy and reciprocity. In this work, we will present some preliminary remarks on the construction of cultural identity representations by the students who took part in the project, from 2006 to 2012, the specificity of the exchanges we analyze being that most of the French students involved in them are third generation Portuguese. We will examine the consequences of the introduction of a third culture within exchanges which, linguistically speaking, are bilateral. The French students are often experiencing conflicting feelings toward Brazil and, similarly, the Brazilian students may have conflicting feelings towards Portugal and France. Our preliminary results show that the most successful linguistic exchanges occur when students face their own cultural identity with no feeling of superiority or inferiority.

The use of project pedagogy in teletandem sessions

“…in Modern Languages Degree courses to bring linguistic and (inter)cultural development to the interactants, such as those conducted by Santos (2015), Garcia (2017), Zakir, Funo and Telles (2016), Freschi and Cavalari (2020), Schaefer (2020), among others.…”