The Stirling-Besançon Telephone
Partnership Project was a qualitative study of the linguistic and
socio-cultural experience of university foreign language students linked by
telephone with native speakers of the language and culture they were studying.
Native speakers of English studying French at Stirling University engaged in
regular bilingual telephone calls with students of the Université de
Franche-Comté at Besançon. This qualitative study aimed to show the linguistic
and socio-cultural impact of that experience on four successive sample cohorts
of learners of French (Autumn 2000-Spring 2002). The Stirling students were
selected from those who had little experience of France but were about to spend
a semester or a year there; the Besançon students were training to be teachers
of French as a foreign language.
The telephone interactions consisted
of eight 20 minute sessions, 10 minutes in French, followed by 10 in English.
The interactions were scaffolded by questions about French and British life and
culture relating to the curriculum of the Stirling students. The students were
also linked by e-mail, which they used to set up times for their telephone
interactions and which they were otherwise free to exploit as they liked.