Internationalization at Home and the Development of the Linguistic Skills of Written Expression and Reading Comprehension in Foreign Language Teaching

Introduction

Literature Review

Objectives

The main objective of this article is to analyse and evaluate the methodological relevance of a semi-directed language exchange used in a language teaching context between native speakers of Spanish and native speakers of German. All students had to practice the different communicative skills in the foreign language while they were immersed in a home-based internationalization environment. Such a practice primarily aimed at improving the linguistic and intercultural competences of learners while they are living with all the constraints and restrictions derived from the COVID-19 crisis and were immersed in blended learning environments.

By semi-directed language exchange, we mean the creation of several tandem conversation groups in which students of different nationalities are integrated together and in which the mother tongue of some students was the target language of others, and vice versa. On this occasion, and due to the mobility restrictions derived from the confinement, we teachers considered appropriate to create an atmosphere of internationalization at home for our students and to join our Spanish students learning German as a foreign language with German students learning Spanish as a foreign language at the UAM and with other German students attending lessons at different German universities. We were therefore able to promote a direct contact and linguistic exchange between native speakers of both languages without making them leave their home university.

With the implementation of the tandem methodology within our teaching practices we aimed to achieve the following specific objectives:

To know how internationalization at home may have an impact or an influence on the achievement of the different linguistic objectives set in each of the language courses taught at university and by the CEFR.

To find out the relevance of the tandem methodology for the acquisition and development of the linguistic skills such as the written expression and the reading comprehension in foreign languages.

To find out whether the tandem methodology used in an internationalization environment at home may be useful and lead to develop and encourage the intercultural competence of learners of German as a second foreign language.

To facilitate the students' self-regulated participation in the exchange forums concerning different topics, and to enhance and promote the use of their own technological resources, in order to ensure their real possibilities of access to the network without having to incur in inequalities or undesirable technological gaps.

Methodology and Research Questions

With the aim of verifying the relevance and all the achievements reached through this tandem methodology, we designed a qualitative research based on the methodology of a case study from which we were able to obtain relevant qualitative information from the different questionnaires that were carried out by the informants, who were the same foreign language students that have been mentioned above.

The key questions that guided our research were always closely related to the different general and specific objectives that have been described above. That is:

Is internationalization at home beneficial for the development of the different key language skills and for the development of the intercultural competence of language students?

To what extent do native Spanish speakers and native German speakers value the tandem methodology and the regular exchange of written messages positively?

Can the relationship between students from different backgrounds in the same learning forum be useful to all of them? May it help them - in a collaborative way - to progress in their proficiency in the written expression and/or in the reading comprehension? Can we observe that both groups of students, Spanish and German, make progress in terms of language proficiency?

May the tandem methodology help the students to get to know better the foreign culture(s) of their tandem partners? Will they be able to become more interculturally competent?

Method - Instrument and Context

The method used for data collection in the research based on the case study method described above was the questionnaire. This instrument was made up of a total of 31 questions that explored aspects such as the demographic characteristics of the informants, their assessment and opinion about the tandem project in general and about the work they did in each of the topics addressed in particular, their motivation to learn and some other aspects linked to acquisition/development of each linguistic competence and of the intercultural competence.

The specific context to which we are referring in this article is linked to our teaching activity as teachers of as a second or third foreign language at a Spanish university. Within that context we managed to implement the tandem methodology between Spanish students of German as a foreign language and German-speaking learners of Spanish as a foreign language. The whole tandem project took place during the period of blended learning triggered by the COVID-19 crisis, that is between March and May 2020.

The project was shown and explained in detail to our students during the first session of tuition in the Spring semester. At that time, a long and interesting discussion was held between students and teachers. We all tried to select the different topics that the students were going to work on in the tandem project and the various language exchanges to be established with their classmates and tandem partners. According to their language level and their personal likes and preferences, most students agreed that the most important and motivating topics for them were those related to hobbies and leisure, music and series, the experience of studying abroad, the use and development of language in the Internet age and, finally, all the information about festivals and popular traditions in the foreign culture. All the different groups of students had the opportunity to address and work on each of these topics in the forums and to create a whole and relevant chain of linguistic exchanges. The regular and collaborative work of Spanish and German-speaking students with an equal or very similar level of linguistic competence in the foreign language did not only allow the students to get to know each other and to develop their language skills, but it also led to an interesting and deep analysis and self-awareness of their own and other people's culture and language.

Participants

We must consider two main groups of participants and informants within the tandem project that we present in this article.

On the one hand, we have the group of students who had Spanish as their mothertongue. These were students from different bachelor degrees at the Universidad Autónoma Madrid (Bachelor Degrees such as Translation and Interpreting, English Studies, Modern Languages, Culture and Communication, and Hispanic Studies). All these students were studying German as a second – or even as a third -foreign language. The participants - mostly aged between 19 and 22 - had a foreign language proficiency level of around A2/B1 in the CEFR, and all of them were studying in Madrid on a blended learning basis.

On the other hand, we have the group of students who had German as their mother tongue. Most of these students were in Madrid as incoming students within the Erasmus+ international mobility program, but some of them remained in their home cities in Germany and were only planning to come over to Madrid in a near future. These students were studying different bachelor degrees, such as Law, Psychology or Modern Languages. All of them had in their curriculum the study of Spanish as a foreign language and showed a proficiency level of Spanish of at least B1 in the CEFR.

Finally, and although they were not the object of this study, all the teaching staff from the German department of the Faculty in Madrid participated actively in this project too. They were very active in the supervision of the different exchange forums and they also carried out the preparation on each of the topics on which the tandem project was based on.

Data Collection Tool

The teachers involved in the project worked on a questionnaire elaborated as a data collection tool, and once it was ready, it was made available to all the participants in the project in the last weeks of regular tuition at university. Then, each informant was required to complete all the questions in the data collection tool anonymously and they were given as much time as they needed to do so.

In addition, and since the questionnaire was conducted through the Google Forms application, all the answers collected were also automatically sent to the teachers' register, which was helpful and saved a lot of time.

Data Analysis - Qualitative Data

Considering the answers given by the students in the questionnaire, we can observe that about 60% of the informants say that they really liked and enjoyed their active participation in the tandem language exchange project as a tool linked to an internationalization framework at home (5 points out of 5). 31% of the students rated it 4 out of 5. In other words, the vast majority of the group (91%) was very happy or happy with the project and with the positive effect it had had on their language learning process. With this satisfaction, they do not only refer to the cognitive aspect, but they also explicitly refer to other aspects, such as the affective and the motivational factors.

Regarding the different topics that were addressed by the students during their participation in the tandem project, most students stated that those topics had been useful, in order to be able to work collaboratively with foreign students whom they had never met before. These topics also helped them to increase their knowledge of the target learning culture and to develop their linguistic skills. 70% of the informants rated them as very adequate, whereas 25% of them rated the topics as adequate. Only 5% considered that the selected topics had had neither a positive nor a negative influence on their linguistic or intercultural development during their participation in the tandem project.

When assessing the different topics addressed by the students in their language exchanges, we could also find different degrees of interest in each of them:

Music and culture: 81%.

Getting to know each other: 58%

Festivals and popular traditions: 55%.

Studying abroad: 50%

Learning languages in the Internet age: 39%.

Students’ motivation or lack of motivation was also a particularly important issue for us teachers, since most of the students said in the aforementioned questionnaire that they had often felt somehow unprepared and unmotivated when they had to face a new and totally unexpected reality which was affecting their families, social life and academic situation because of the COVID-pandemic.

Figure 1

In Figure 1 we see that 77% of the informants felt very encouraged or encouraged to continue with their German courses after their participation in the tandem project. They considered that it had promoted the real communication in the foreign language and that the contact with native speakers through digital tools had helped them to improve their language and cultural skills.

Many of the questions in the questionnaire used for collecting data also revealed a clear trend towards the positive development of language skills. It is true that some skills were not worked on, such as the oral expression and/or the oral comprehension in the foreign language. We failed to assess the development and evolution of the students in those skills. However, in the questions referring to the development of the reading comprehension skills, 64% of the informants stated that their active participation in the tandem project had been helpful or very helpful, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2

Whereas communication between the native Spanish and German-speaking students was based almost exclusively on the production and comprehension of written texts, these competencies are also very much reinforced in the informants' evaluation (see Figure 3). Thus, 25% of the informants rated their progress in this skill as very positive, and 45% also answered that the tandem experience had helped them a lot. We can therefore observe that 70% of the participants had a positive or a very positive assessment of the tandem as a useful method to improve their language proficiency in the foreign language.

Figure 3

Finally, we would also like to briefly comment the data that refer to the subjective awareness of the participants in the project in relation to their progress in the so-called intercultural competence. 33% of the informants stated that this experience based on the internationalization at home had been totally adequate to deepen their intercultural competence, not only from a cognitive level, but also from an affective and attitudinal perspective. Likewise, 45% of the informants gave 4 points out of 5 to the adequacy of this project in terms of having been able to achieve that objective. The data collected in Figure 4 show that 78% of the students had found the project very useful and convenient to develop their intercultural competence and get to know the foreign culture better.

Figure 4

Evaluation and Results

Having analyzed the qualitative data discussed above and referring back to the proposed objectives at the beginning of this article, we can conclude that the project based on the semidirected language exchange in a home-based internationalization environment has more than fulfilled all the goals that we had originally expected to achieve in this study.

With regard to the first objective, that is the evaluation of internationalization at home as a support for the development of key competencies, we must affirm that the data collected through this study support a very close relationship between the development of linguistic skills and the language and cultural exchanges between Spanish native speakers learning German and German students learning Spanish, even though some of the latter students remained in their corresponding home universities. There is no doubt that the exchange in an environment involving a total linguistic immersion will always be extremely beneficial. However, in the pandemic scenario in which we are now living, the tandem methodology is proposed as a useful resource of great value for all foreign language learners.

Regarding the development of written comprehension, which was our second specific objective, it has become clear that there is also a close relationship between the use of forums and platforms for real language exchanges and for the development of students' comprehension skills. Their motivation when learning a foreign language significantly grows when they have to deal with authentic texts dealing with topics of interest and when they have to work collaboratively with other students and that is how this key competence may also be reinforced.

The tandem methodology has also been endorsed as a context of exchange in which it is possible to develop the multicultural competence, as we proposed in the third specific objective. It is important to assume here that it is not only a matter of an exchange of knowledge related to the target culture. It is also about developing other competencies that allow for an effective intercultural communication, based on attitudes and on other solid affective factors that allow the existence of a natural, adequate, real and fluent communication in the foreign language.

Finally, and as we mentioned in the fourth specific objective, active and collaborative digital methodologies have been often implemented in the last few months, since they do not require synchronous meetings in the networks, and that makes it possible for each student to interact in the forums when they have the real possibility to do so. Thus, all students have had the same requirements without experiencing disadvantages or limitations for not having the necessary technological resources. These teaching practices have therefore provided the students with an adequate learning autonomy and equal opportunities.

Discussion and Limitations of Future Research

Leaving aside the necessary mobility restrictions set by the scientific and political authorities in times of COVID-19 pandemic, the implementation of the new teaching models and practices referred to in this article clearly shows that collaborative learning through digital tools among students of different nationalities has a very positive impact on their motivation. It allows them to make a more effective and real use of all the linguistic and intercultural skills that they have acquired and to put their language training into practice in a regular and very active way in real multilingual communicative environments. Thanks to these teaching practices in which they can reinforce, consolidate and apply the grammatical structures and vocabulary that they have acquired not only in the language classroom but also in the web and in the tandem practice with foreign students, language learners appear to feel much more attracted to other languages and cultures and that increases and encourages their desire to participate in internationalization experiences both inside and outside their own country.

Nowadays, when international mobility - so necessary for language learners as a complement to their academic training - seems unthinkable or at least it remains subject to very strict limitations, the implementation of teaching methodologies such as tandem experiences allow for an adequate development not only of the key linguistic competencies such as written expression and reading comprehension, oral expression and comprehension, but also of the essential intercultural competence (Bennet, 1986; Deardorff, 2006). In this sense, the limited physical mobility of students in times of the COVID-29 crisis is thus complemented by innovative teaching practices that favor internationalization at home (Beelen and Jones, 2015; Brandenburg, 2014; Fritz, W. and Möllenberg, A.,2002; Robson S., 2017). Moreover, for many students, for whom participation in a physical mobility program to other countries is limited by different factors such as economic, family, personal, work-related factors, etc., immersion in their foreign language classes in certain intercultural and multilingual spaces and their active participation in collaborative learning activities with students from other cultures, offers them a kind of alternative mobility, that is, as a kind of virtual mobility and a certain internationalization within their corresponding home universities.

In summary, the exceptional scenario brought about by the irruption of COVID-19 to the educational environment has highlighted the need to (re)think and implement alternative teaching methodologies in the classroom to the traditional face-to-face teaching. The enormous challenge that teachers and students have had to face by suddenly having to adapt most of their teaching/learning activities to an online format should therefore be understood not as a handicap, but rather as the opposite; that is, as an opportunity to foster the true internationalization of teaching practices - physical or virtual - favoring the development of all the linguistic and intercultural skills reflected in the CEFR.

The challenge of creating collaborative learning spaces and networks at the various HEIs is now more relevant than ever, and it requires the collaboration of all teachers in the design of new teaching practices, resources and learning and assessment tools, as well as the necessary training of teachers and students in the handling of new technologies.

References