This paper aims at describing the characteristics of a blended foreign language learning context in which a series of teletandem sessions has been integrated into the syllabus of an EFL course at UNESP (in São José do Rio Preto). It focuses on the changes that have been made in the implementation of teletandem practice so that it became a pedagogic activity that is embedded in an EFL course with a number of tasks to be performed and subject to the professor's assessment. It is argued that such modifications have made it possible to characterize a new modality of teletandem in Brazil: institutionalintegrated teletandem (Aranha & Cavalari, 2014). This new modality, as implemented at UNESP-Rio Preto, entails the presence of some constituent elements, such as preparation of participants, integration of tasks and of assessment.
The amount of data produced during teletandem practice can be considered extensive. Since 2011, teletandem researchers at UNESP (Sao Paolo State University) at São José do Rio Preto have been worried about compiling and organizing the data from groups of Brazilian and American students who interact via internet tools to learn each other´s language. This paper aims at describing how the data generated from 2012-2015 and collected according to the procedures described by Aranha, Luvizari-Murad and Moreno (2015) were treated and transformed into Multimodal Teletandem Corpus (MulTeC).
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the first 15 minutes of ten initial Teletandem Oral Sessions (iTOS), which means the first virtual encounter among speakers of different languages who want to study the each other’s language. Our aim is to verify iTOS genre status within a telecollaborative learning environment. We understand genres as communicative events organized in standard structures used by members of a discourse community to achieve their communicative purposes (Swales, 1990) and assume that the teletandem context is composed of a specific community with shared objectives. A study of iTOS had first been proposed by Aranha (2014), who analyzed nine iTOS and identified some recurrence in their discoursal structure. Our data, ten iTOS, are part of a previous version of MulTeC (Multimodal Teletandem Corpus) (Aranha & Lopes, forthcoming) and participants are proficient in Portuguese and English. The video files were transcribed and the sessions were analyzed based on Aranha’s (2014) findings. We identified rhetorical organization for the sessions which was similar to Aranha’s, but varied depending on the learning scenarios, i.e. the learning context in which they occurred.
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