Teletandem’s contributions to the pre-service Spanish - Foreign Language teachers

Abstract

This research aims at highlighting the contributions of Integrated Institutional Teletandem in the education of initial teachers of Spanish as a Foreign Language (SFL). The telecollaborative meetings were held during the lessons of the subject matter "Practices of linguistic-cultural exchanges through Teletandem", which was offered in the 2023.1 semester of the Spanish Language course at the Universidade Estadual da Paraíba (UEPB), with the cooperation of Mexican students from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Thus, we developed a netnographic case study (André, 1995; Kozinets, 2014) of a qualitative nature (André, 1995; André; Gatti, 2008), aligned with the interpretivist paradigm (Bortoni-Ricardo, 2008), by examining the Brazilian students' experience narratives and reflections in their final report on their telecollaborative learning activities. The findings reveal that Brazilian-Mexican people learned and exchanged linguistic and cultural knowledge, allowing them to develop critical-reflexive views of the differences, as well as improving their intercultural communicative competence during the interaction and peer mediation sessions. In this way, the data confirms the notion of Teletandem as an excellent and fruitful environment for the education of foreign language teachers, specifically Spanish language teachers.