“Three months on, I still sound like an Anglophone”: Tales of Success and Failure told by English and French Tandem Partners

Abstract

This paper reports on two ways in which success and failure can be operationalized and quantified in a non-institutional L2 learning context such as language tandem setting. We draw on the SITAF database, where we gathered 25 hours of video-recorded conversations held by 21 pairs, each consisting of a native speaker of English and a native speaker of French. The tandems performed collaborative tasks in both languages, thus giving each participant ample opportunity to be both the ‘expert’ and the ‘novice’ (learner) part of the dialogue. The tandem partners met regularly and autonomously outside of the recording sessions, and making progress in their L2 was one of their declared goals. Two possible measures of success in achieving this goal are: (1) the quality and quantity of learner uptake which followed the expert’s corrective feedback (CF) during the recorded conversations. Significant differences between the two L1 groups were observed: while 52% of the CF given by the native French speakers met with total uptake, over 52% of the English CF generated no uptake at all; (2) the participants’ own narratives of progress, as both the experts and the learners, obtained through questionnaires they filled out at the end of the program. Our study aims to contribute to the discussion on the stakes of successful L2 informal learning (with a focus on the acquisition of L2 pronunciation) by adopting a perspective which combines learners’ spoken output data and learners’ perceptions of their own language learning activity.