By Bella Whitmore | Intern
When it comes to learning a new language, the No. 1 piece of advice from professionals is to have conversations with native speakers. At Baylor, Teletandem allows students to do this from the comfort of the classroom.
Pioneered by Dr. João Antonio Telles in 2007, Teletandem provides Baylor students with the opportunity to video chat with college students from around the world. It was started solely for Baylor students studying Portuguese to talk to students at the Universidade Estadual Paulista in São Paulo.
Since then, Dr. Fernanda Bueno, senior lecturer in Spanish and Portuguese, has taken up the role of head of the program.
“We started [Teletandem] in order to connect Brazilian students from UNESP with other students around the globe via live video interaction to practice languages, exchange cultural experiences and simply to promote human relations,” Bueno said.
Teletandem provides an alternative form of learning, and the beauty of the program lies in its mutually beneficial nature: Half of the hour is spent in English, while the next half is spent in the other targeted language.
Dr. Leslie Harkema, division director of Spanish and Portuguese, said interacting with a native speaker gives students the opportunity to learn more than they could from a book.
“It has been very much well-studied that cultural exchange that is made possible through virtual communication is incredibly beneficial for both parties,” Harkema said. “Talking to a native speaker of a language, you learn what kind of vocabulary and slang people use in a certain location, which is a nice contrast to the abstract grammar-textbook style of learning.”
The program has come a long way since its start in 2007. Now, students use personal Zoom links instead of Skype, and they are more independent and flexible with their schedules. What students talk about during these video chats is also quite flexible, which allows students to be comfortable and makes conversation and connection flow more naturally.
“Students can talk about the weather or debate literature, film, current events, any subject,” Bueno said. “As language learners, I tell my students to start with the topic of our current lesson, but I know the conversation takes off on its own, and students are allowed to use any tool for good communication — Google, images, anything.”
This year, Teletandem is expanding to Spanish classes. Baylor students studying Spanish can connect with students at the Universidad del Caribe in Cancún, Mexico. This is a major step for the program, considering Spanish is the most popular language taken at Baylor.
“For Teletandem, all I need to do is to send the list of my students to the program in Brazil, and they match with their students according to the schedule I choose,” Bueno said. “Through the Brazilian connection, I met a professor at the Universidad del Caribe in Cancún, and we started the Spanish Tandem, which is promising good results and growing for the next semester.”
This connection with students from Latin America who are striving to learn English can be incredibly useful in the language-learning process, no matter what level they are at.
“It’s a real-life experience where you get to speak with real-life students in another country who are all similar in age,” Harkema said. “It makes the cultural component that much more real and applicable since it’s a lot more easy to find things in common across cultures, which is very exciting.”
The future of Teletandem looks bright, as Bueno said she hopes to extend the program to all language classes offered at Baylor.
“I believe Teletandem and other languages’ tandems are a tool that helps to fulfill Baylor’s mission to educate men and women to be world leaders with compassion, humility and understanding of other peoples,” Bueno said.
