Teletandem between French and Brazilian students: Some preliminary remarks

Abstract

In its French-Brazilian version, the Teletandem Brazil project enablesstudents from the University of Lille 3 (France) and from the StateUniversity of São Paulo (Unesp, Brazil), to take part in online exchanges,based on the principles of autonomy and reciprocity. In this work, we willpresent some preliminary remarks on the construction of cultural identityrepresentations by the students who took part in the project, from 2006to 2012, the specifi city of the exchanges we analyze being that most ofthe French students involved in them are third generation Portuguese.We will examine the consequences of the introduction of a third culturewithin exchanges which, linguistically speaking, are bilateral. The Frenchstudents are often experiencing confl icting feelings toward Brazil and,similarly, the Brazilian students may have confl icting feelings towardsPortugal and France. Our preliminary results show that the most successfullinguistic exchanges occur when students face their own cultural identitywith no feeling of superiority or inferiority.