The following news item was originally published here as a press item by Massey University in Palmerston, New Zealand.
Language Learning in Tandem, Online
Take two groups of students from different universities, studying different courses in two different languages, and put them together online to help each other learn. That’s e-Tandem, a form of collaborative online learning, piloted in semester one in the School of Language Studies by Dr Ute Walker.
The project involved a group of extramural intermediate German language students at the Palmerston North campus and students of an English for the Social Sciences course at the Wilhelm’s University of Münster, in Germany. The students communicated using Wimba voice tools that support spoken language in asynchronous and real-time mode.
Working in small groups, the students sourced and exchanged information and discussed ideas in order to complete a written task (New Zealand) or an oral presentation (Germany), relevant to their respective curriculum.
Dr Walker says that planning together with the project partner in Münster, Christina Holtz, was a profitable and enriching experience, involving identifying common learning outcomes, designing tasks around contemporary global themes and addressing or anticipating challenges, not least due to time differences between the two countries.
For the students, the e-Tandem provided a cross-cultural encounter and an authentic learning experience using the foreign language. Feedback Dr Walker collected during a recent visit to the University of Münster complements other baseline data for a TEC-funded distance learning guidelines project, jointly undertaken with Professor Cynthia White of the School of Language Studies.
A tandem task may be used in the Introductory German II course again next year, after students have learnt to use the communication tools in Semester One, Dr Walker says.