The idea of staying with a host family, especially a British one, seems to have become tainted with ideas that one will receive terrible food, poor hospitality and to only be welcome for the financial benefit of the family.

I am here to dispel that myth.

Personal experience

When I was a kid growing up in Hove (near Brighton), East Sussex, we used to have foreign students staying with us. It only occurred to me in later life when I began to work for a language study abroad company, that we were actually a “host family”. My sister and I used to love having foreign students stay with us and we have some really great memories of the fun we had with them. We were a classic English host family: 2 young children (I was around 5/6 and my sister 7/8 when we hosted students), host mother a nurse and host father an engineer, oh yes, and we had a cat!

We used to enjoy watching students react to our customs and habits, especially when they were very different to theirs. This was particularly noticeable with our Japanese and Saudi Arabian students. We also used to very much enjoy it when our students shared their customs with us. We loved it when our Japanese students cooked us food from Japan or taught us origami with the special origami paper. We often stayed in contact via letter for a long time after the students left. In one case one of our Colombian students visited us again 2 years after she had stayed with us.

The experience for us, as children, was incredibly enriching and I feel sure that the experience for the students was a good one too.

Variety of subjective opinions

Having spoken to many students and worked with language schools for some years now, the host family situation doesn’t seem to have changed at all. The trouble seems to be that one person’s opinion of a good host family can vary vastly compared to the next person’s opinion. On several occasions working as a language course agent we would find that two completely unconnected people will have gone to the same school, had the same teachers and stayed with the same host family and one would have had the time of their life and the other would have found it to be a complete nightmare. That has always bemused me.

Preferred option for study abroad

It is mainly for that reason that I still veer in favour of host families being the accommodation of choice when taking an English language course abroad. It is very unusual for families in the UK to take students on purely for the financial benefit. Many hosts will have a spare room from when their own children have left home and enjoy the company of people from a wealth of different cultures and backgrounds. As I mentioned before, it can be a very enriching experience. And it is, without a doubt, the best way to use and practise English outside the classroom. This is especially important for Spanish students who often struggle to find destinations where there aren’t too many other Spanish-speaking students (Hove and Brighton are no exception).

Language school reputation

The language schools themselves also don’t want to work with host families that get negative feedback and are hosting students for the wrong reasons, it’s not of any benefit to the school to work with host families like this. All schools have an accommodation officer who vets the hosts before letting students stay there and many of the families have had such continual good feedback that they have been working with the schools for many years. Any host families that have regular negative reports from students would be dropped from the school’s list of hosts.

As for the food, well, I know my Mum wasn’t the world’s greatest cook, but the food was simple and was certainly British!

What experiences of staying with a host family have you had? Do you think an alternative accommodation type is better for practising English outside the classroom?

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