Due to the pandemic context, the sudden arrival of teaching online in the university setting has profoundly changed pedagogical habits, especially in the case of foreign language teaching. With the aim of responding to the deficit of speaking interaction generated by these changes, several initiatives have been launched. Among these, within the teaching of Spanish and French as foreign languages at the University for Foreigners of Siena and of Italian as a Second Language at the University of Poitiers, in the summer of 2021 e-tandem systems were proposed, oriented towards voluntary students from seven universities in Latin America and Europe. This paper will present, after having recollected the principles of autonomy and of collaborative learning based on linguistic tandems and having searched through the literature on the role of the teacher in question, an online questionnaire given out to around 350 participants in the initiative. The data collected will then be presented and discussed, to reflect finally on the type of tutoring to propose to the participating students in order to maximise their learning of a second language
