Project Erasmus Mentors: an experience of mentorship and SFL teaching

Abstract

Intercultural competence is defined by the CEFR as one of those that is later worked on in the learning of foreign languages. Contact between peers from different cultures facilitates learning, by providing language, experiences, and a shared intercultural and generational universe. Implementing actions that strengthen and soften intercultural differences is, in the current environment, a need to the fore, and it reduces distances in such a way that inequalities are reduced, as required by the sustainable development goals.

This article narrates a project carried out in the second semester of the 2019-2020 academic year in the subject Spanish Lexicon and in 2020/2021 in Grammar of Spanish as a Foreign Language at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. Native Spanish students and a large percentage of foreign students from various backgrounds congregate there. Given that one of the purposes of this subject is to train future teachers of Spanish as a foreign language (hereinafter ELE), it was proposed to the students that each one freely “welcome and tutor” a foreign student during the four months of the course and in pairs to support each other in learning Spanish, putting into practice didactic activities seen in class. The student tutor would guide the student being tutored in the first steps of his/her immersion in a foreign country, saving the cultural distances typical of these beginnings.

As a result of this experience, we observed a strengthening of links between the students, an improvement and enrichment in the experience abroad by the invited students, as well as intercultural knowledge and knowledge in the early stages of learning ELE for native students. These are very valuable in the medium term, allowing them to act as teachers in a safe environment, where error is accepted as part of the teaching-learning process and cultural and interpersonal differences are positively addressed. The activity allows, finally, to turn cultural differences into a stimulus for learning.