Fluent speakers of a target language choosing to enrol in beginner-level courses at tertiary institutes could be considered unfair. In this paper, however, based on data obtained from in-depth qualitative interviews with 12 students at a Hong Kong university, we show that fluent speakers of Japanese -- a widely-spoken foreign language in Hong Kong…

The transition to student-centred learning, advances in teleconferencing tools, and active international student exchange programmes have stimulated tandem learning in many parts of the world. This pedagogical model is based on a mutual language exchange between tandem partners, where each student is a native speaker in the language the…