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Pilgrims 2005 Teacher Training Courses - Read More
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Humanising Language Teaching
Humanising Language Teaching
Humanising Language Teaching
READERS' LETTERS

Downsides of staying in UK host families

Dear Editor,

I read with interest the accounts in the January 2005 Issue of HLT by an Italian girl and a Thai girl staying in UK host families. My own experience was less satisfying than theirs. This is maybe to do with the difference between being in your early twenties , as they were, and being a forty something, as I am.
I spent two weeks in a host family in UK and I found that I was uneasy about all the explicit and implicit rules that the air seemed too full of. I do not like to be told that I can only bring one friend to the house at a time. I do not like to have to sit through the family saying "grace" at the start of each meal. I am not religious. I feel uneasy about being asked not to use the garden, which is for the family only.
I know that the English love to try and reduce their fear of uncertainly by multiplying their rules but I don't feel good, at my age, about playing these games.

I wonder how many other people have had unsettling experiences in UK homes? Am I alone? Maybe this is why many of us mainland Europeans prefer to go to EFL schools in Ireland?

Yours sincerely,

Anastasia Diamantopoulou

Athens, Greece.

Please click here for Student Voices in the January 2005 Issue by Lorenza and Uraiwan.

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