Language homestays - total immersion in culture and language

What do you do on your holidays? Something useful?

A language homestay is the most simple of concepts. By residing in the place where you have no other language to speak other than the one you're supposed to be learning, you get an intensity that is hard to reproduce in standard school situations.

You can customise the homestay how you want. But there is a standard package. If you're a child, or a student or a professional or retired, it's the same.

France
- for English, German and French

Let's say you come to France to study French. It's quite the best place to do it. If you go to the shops, or visit the sites, you've only got French all around you, so in a short space of time, whatever age you are, the constant repetition of words and phrases will have sunk in.

But the language homestay remains a holiday. The principle is that there is a minimum of one week of stay. In this week you'll have five days of class, four hours per day, so that is twenty of hours of classic classwork. In class you'll only be spoken to in the target language, in this case French. If you don't understand you can indicate, but in front of you you have a qualified  teacher who has methods to make it clear to you what he is trying to communicate, and how you should complete the communication exercise. The objective is that you start to see language as a native speaker sees it. He receives an impulse, and has a limited set of ways of reacting to that impulse in the target language. He chooses one.

The schedule could be two hours of class in the morning, and two hours in the evening. The afternoon could be filled with an organised activity, a visit to the Battlefields of Verdun for example, or a round of golf at the nearby sports complex in the National Park where the language homestay is situated.

By the end of the week you have received a mix of intensive class instruction, individually or in a group,  nothing like you will have experienced in school, and further freetime activities where the target language is still being used. All day you'll have French buzzing around in your head.

All-in package

This intensity will have a price, because you will be housed, and fed, and be given class and activities for a whole week. You'll be surprised at the price. Our 2018 tariffs start from £500 for a two week language homestay, depending on season and booking conditions. You'll need to use your currency converter to find the tarif in Euros or dollars, but it's a snip.

How is a language homestay  able to maintain such low tariffs? It's all about intensity, intensity of experience, of manpower, and concept. When you come on a language homestay, you receive an intensity that saves money on transport, on organisation and staff.

What a cheap, effective way of learning a language!