“Three months on, I still sound like an Anglophone”: Tales of Success and Failure told by English and French Tandem Partners
“Three months on, I still sound like an Anglophone”: Tales of Success and Failure told by English and French Tandem Partners

Summary/Abstract: This paper reports on two ways in which success and failure can be operationalized andquantified in a non-institutional L2 learning context such as language tandem setting. Wedraw on the SITAF database, where we gathered 25 hours of video-recorded conversationsheld by 21 pairs, each consisting of a native speaker of English and a native speaker of French.The tandems performed collaborative tasks in both languages, thus giving each participantample opportunity to be both the ‘expert’ and the ‘novice’ (learner) part of the dialogue. Thetandem partners met regularly and autonomously outside of the recording sessions, and makingprogress in their L2 was one of their declared goals. Two possible measures of successin achieving this goal are: (1) the quality and quantity of learner uptake which followed theexpert’s corrective feedback (CF) during the recorded conversations. Significant differencesbetween the two L1 groups were observed: while 52% of the CF given by the native Frenchspeakers met with total uptake, over 52% of the English CF generated no uptake at all;(2) the participants’ own narratives of progress, as both the experts and the learners, obtainedthrough questionnaires they filled out at the end of the program. Our study aims to contributeto the discussion on the stakes of successful L2 informal learning (with a focus on theacquisition of L2 pronunciation) by adopting a perspective which combines learners’ spokenoutput data and learners’ perceptions of their own language learning activity.

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