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Abstract:

This contribution argues in favor of the potential of face-to-face tandem as a specific educational format with regard to the need for disclosure to language learners of difficult and sensitive communication topics such as emotions, which under traditional teaching circumstances hardly make their way into the learning/teaching process. Our presentation pursues two goals. First, we briefly report on the essence and practicalities of an existing and structurally embedded tandem course at KU Leuven. Second, we provide empirical data drawn from the open tandem-corpus, which thrives parallel to the tandem course and which consists of the authorized recordings of dozens of tandem interactions of 90 minutes each. We will report on the emotion-related topics, which are covered in the corpus. From there we want to identify both opportunities and challenges of this format in an attempt to enhance the integration of emotion-related communication in the language learning process. The face-to-face tandem course, which serves as our case study, exists since 2010 in the curriculum of the Linguistics & Literature program of the University of Leuven (KU Leuven). Flemish students (native language Dutch) who take the bachelor program in German Linguistics and Literature and who agreed to take part in the course, arrange regular meetings with German speaking Erasmus students in Leuven. Each tandem couple meets 10 times for a 90 minutes conversation. After every meeting, the Flemish students write and submit a blog report (400 words). The general aim of the course is to create a win/win situation, in which foreign students, in return for their conversational expertise in their mother tongue, get a quick and personalized access to the local student communities, but also to the broader culture and language of the hosting city, region and country. One of the major benefits for students from Leuven lies in the opportunity to improve and optimize their proficiency in the language of their study. In light of the inherently peer-based design of this educational format, in which students engage in a one-on-one relationship with a foreign student, we expect person-related conversation topics such as feelings and emotions to be easier and more naturally accessible compared to classroom formats. Based on our current experiences and obtained course evaluations, we expect the tandem corpus to reveal first indicative and consistent results in support of this view. To illustrate the potential of tandem, we will provide linguistic examples taken from both the corpus (conversation excerpts), but also some reported and observed interpersonal aspects, which pertain to the social dimension of the course. The main challenges for further optimizing the tandem for our current goal lie in (a) the pairing of the tandem partners with respect to reported fields of interest, preferences with respect to gender, personality, age, … of the tandem partner, but also in (b) the delicate listing of feelings/emotions-related issues as conversation topics.