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Abstract
Despite national efforts for internationalization, college student enrollment in language programs is in decline (MLA, 2019), and the United States continues to be a very monolingual country. Similarly, although Brazil is seen as an ethnically diverse and multicultural nation, and that the country’s common core standards consider English to be a Lingua Franca (BNCC, 2017), only around 5% of Brazilians report having some knowledge of the language, most of whom are affluent and have access to world languages and study abroad for a longer period of time (British Council, 2014). Telecollaboration, well-established even before the pandemic, can connect geographically distant people to teach and learn languages, develop digital skills, and further cultural understanding. This study explores the experiences of ten undergraduate students participating in the program “Teletandem Brazil: Foreign Languages for all,” a telecollaborative language exchange program. It examines the North American language classroom, observing how telecollaboration was implemented and what results it had on students’ engagement and learning. Guided by a sociocultural approach to human development (Vygotsky, 1978), this qualitative project combined Formative Interventions and Change Laboratory methodologies to understand and present the findings. Data collection occurred over a span of three years. The bulk of the data was collected in an intermediate-level Portuguese language classroom that integrated Teletandem between September and October of 2018. Data analysis and further data collection continued until 2021 and supported the retelling of the history of telecollaboration implementation, as well as the discussion of its community, cultures, and objects. The investigation of the application of different Teletandem tasks, combined with the author’s ten-year experience observing the integration of telecollaboration in the setting, allowed for a careful consideration of the Teletandem design and implementation. This study is the first to discuss how the integration of Teletandem tasks occurs in the partnering universities. It has identified several qualities of implementing synchronous and asynchronous Teletandem tasks, whether integrated or not, into the language classroom. Implications include a critical analysis of the contradictions that arose from the utilization of telecollaboration and a series of proposals and suggestions on how to implement telecollaborative exchanges.