Michael BARR    Department   Kyoto Junior College of Foreign Languages  , Department of English Studies for Careers    Position   Associate Professor
Date	2020/11/14
Presentation Theme	Tandem Lessons for the 21st Century
Conference	ETA 2020 - 29th International Symposium on English Teaching
Promoters	English Teacher's Association - Republic of China
Conference Type	International
Presentation Type	Speech (General)
Contribution Type	Collaborative
Venue	Taipei, Taiwan
Publisher and common publisher	Michael D. Barr, Robert J. McClung, Yi-hung Cathy Liao
Details	The purpose of the most recent project between Wenzao Ursuline University (WZU) and Kyoto University of Foreign Studies (KUFS) has been to explicitly take the idea of an international "tandem learning" framework in a new direction. Rather than attempting to conduct a language exchange, we have made it our goal to engage two groups of students from different cultures and educational institutions to discuss and develop issue-based writing while both groups use their second language, the lingua franca of English. The book chosen for our discussion and writing projects was one with a broad range of issues. Participants in the project read excerpts from the book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), written by the historian Dr. Yuval Noah Harari. This project was grounded in collaboration and cooperation. With the advancement of technologies, internet tools, and with hand-held smartphone applications becoming common practice (Mishima, 2018), the constraints of the traditional classroom have been unshackled. Learning has become more socially interactive and multimodal for university students (Jones & Hafner, 2011; Richards, 2015). Recently, EFL classrooms are becoming more innovative through a variety of methods including blended learning, flipped classrooms, self-access study spaces and autonomous learning approaches. Although not necessarily new and innovative, tandem learning is beginning to become more predominant in the classroom in order to reach students who are culturally different and utilizing the same foreign language. Consequently, tandem learning can be viewed as not only a technique for improving language skills, but more importantly as a means of providing an authentic social interaction experience between students of different backgrounds (Firth & Wagner, 2007; Pörn & Hansell, 2017).