Meeting Each Other or Meeting Learning Goals – Student and Teacher Values in an Intercultural Tandem Exchange

Abstract 

In this paper, the findings from a qualitative analysis of student and teacher interviews following an online Japanese-Swedish tandem exchange in 2020 will be discussed. The main aim was to explore what students and teachers had valued in the exchange and to connect these values to the theoretical principles of reciprocity and autonomy in the tandem learning model (Little & Brammerts 1996). The results show that students valued reciprocal aspects, focusing on personal peer-to-peer experiences and the opportunity for natural language use, while teachers valued linguistic development, and seemed to implicitly assume a high degree of autonomy to be in place from the start, rather than it being developed or expanded underway. The findings are viewed in the light of the students’ rather different cultural-educational frames and add to building a more global perspective on tandem exchange, which has hitherto been dominated by data from European and American contexts (Lewis & O’Dowd 2016).