ABSTRACT
In Tandem, two principles are of great importance: learner autonomy and reciprocity between the learners. The goal of the present study is to examine learners’ logs used in teletandem (i.e., tandem through desktop videoconference) contexts, in order to understand how learners express themselves about the principle of reciprocity. The corpus consists of learners’ reflective logs and is composed of three sub-corpora: (1) individual logs written in Word documents by Brazilian learners of German from a Brazilian-German teletandem; (2) logs of French students on a collective blog from a French-US teletandem; (3) logs of Australian and French students on a collective blog from an Australian-French teletandem. In a qualitative perspective, the study combines content and discourse analysis to build participant-relevant categories of how the principle of reciprocity is implemented and perceived by learners. Moreover, it considers to whom the logs are written, which are meaningful as three different kinds of log formats are used. The aim is to understand and to categorize the representation of the reciprocity principle and of social presence in teletandem sessions. Some extracts correspond to the definitions of the reciprocity principle present in the literature and in addition, new categories have been found that lead us to question these definitions and possibly broaden them.
