Narrative Inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) understands human experience as lived and told stories. Within this qualitative mode of research, participants tell stories and researchers retell and reconstruct them through narratives about the experiences. By having this methodological framework as the backbone of our research, we have conducted a narrative inquiry into our shared experience of in-tandem learning of Portuguese and Italian - an eight month experience of a face-to-face tandem. Within this period we experienced and collected data about our learning processes of learning each other's languages: field notes, reflexive e-mail messages exchanged during that period and our notes during our lessons. As we relive our stories of that period by means of the narrative we present here, we want to highlight the identity elements in our tandem that we found to be related to learning. We also wish to point out the triggering elements of identity that are peculiar to this learning context.
Narrative inquiry; in-tandem learning; identity; foreign language; face-to-face tandem