Press room

The Tandem tool has the support of the UOC’s Open Innovation Office and during the last academic year matched 100 students of English at the UOC with 100 students of Spanish at the UK’s Open University and Dublin’s Instituto Cervantes, and 35 students of Chinese with language partners at the University of Nanking and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Likewise, 470 students of English at the UOC have used Tandem to practise among themselves.

The innovation in Tandem is not so much in the technology (based on the Moodle course management system and the Skype internet calling software) as in the academic aspects, which produced more complicated challenges. Christine Appel has been researching how to get students in English and Spanish together in a context that allows each to make the most of the experience since 1995. She explains that “the challenge has always been the same. If you get two strangers together and they don’t speak each other’s language, they will probably not know what to say. And the learning cannot rely on the possibility of their being extraverts and getting on.”

Another key factor are the topics for conversation, which in this kind of exercise normally involve exchanging opinions and talking about the cultures of the home countries. “Research shows that producing spontaneous debate is very difficult. If it is difficult in the classroom, it is even more so when talking to a native of a language you don’t feel sure about. You end up talking about the simplest things, about clichés: bulls, sangria, flamenco, etc.”.

Christine Appel’s proposal is diametrically opposed to the traditional approach and is evidence-based: “When would we normally speak to a stranger on the phone? When we need their help to get some information”. Thus, in the exercises designed, both students need to talk to each other to get information that only the other has.

Warm reception
Appel stated that the response from the UOC students who had tried Tandem had been “very positive” given that, for many of them, “it is the first chance they have had to have a conversation in English with a native speaker”. Thus, she added, “the UOC is working to sign agreements with the Open University [UK] to integrate this practice into the syllabus so that every student can have a partner on Tandem”. Likewise, she said that they were “developing tools to aid management of synchronous tasks and increasing the range of contents in exercises so as to be able to include video and images”.