Cultivating Language Learning Through Cultural Sensitivity and Empathy. An e-Tandem Case Study of Mexican and Canadian Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines how cultural sensibility and empathy towards the interlocutor foster language learning and intercultural competence. We analyzed the results of an e-Tandem program conducted between a private high school in Vancouver, Canada, and a public high school in Mexico City. The program consisted of two phases: the first involved a series of online letter exchanges, as well as the exchange of handwritten letters and souvenirs; in the second, participants engaged in virtual meetings through a video conferencing platform. We collected data through surveys that captured challenges, language strategies, and cultural insights; video recordings of student interactions; facilitator observations; and student-created artifacts such as letters, postcards, and gifts. Despite the significant differences in the participants' backgrounds, a key finding of the study was that the process of writing letters, receiving and replying to them provided students with a valuable space for reflection. This allowed them to learn from others but, most importantly, to learn about themselves. We found that cultural sensitivity involves identifying differences, acknowledging similarities, and, above all, valuing one’s own culture. This foundation helps students negotiate intercultural encounters, know how to address topic they find challenging, and develop a genuine interest in others.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".