Are Tandem Classrooms Effective in Developing Intercultural Communicative Competence?

The aim of this paper is to explore the effectiveness of tandem classrooms in promoting intercultural communicative competence by comparing the competence of students before and after participation in tandem classes. This research is based on the descriptive statistics from a survey administered at a university in South Korea. The survey was conducted in 2016 during the second semester, and it used students who participated in tandem classrooms by employing a questionnaire to measure the effectiveness of the tandem classrooms in relation to intercultural communicative competence and the students’ perception of their own competence after completing the tandem classes. The result of the research shows that unlike the initial expectations, there is no meaningful sign that the surveyed students have developed intercultural communicative competence, which means that tandem classrooms did not actively help students improve this competence. In this study, an in-depth interview with students was also conducted in 2019 to find out why such a result occurred. Although tandem classrooms would be highly valuable as a language learning method, the approach may require redesigning and reimplementation in great detail to become a method for developing intercultural communicative competence. Therefore, this study highlights the underlying need for a revised curriculum for students attending tandem classrooms.