Today's blog comes to you from the only wi-fi cafe in sunny Ilfracombe, North Devon. I wasn't intending to blog at all this week, but the town is awash with French, German and Italian teenagers, all presumably attending a language summer school here, and all, presumably, under the impression that they're going to leave speaking fluent English.
Now, I'm not, by nature, a Grumpy Old Man, and I rant very rarely. However, in the case of so-called Summer Schools for languages, I'm going to make an exception, and I offer this diatribe in the hope that other language teachers will join the debate and post comments, both for and against. It is my humble but strongly-held opinion that children who travel abroad IN GROUPS are going to learn nothing more advanced than "Deux Coca, s'il vous plait" in France, or, if they come to Ilfracombe, "Please, where is bus for Woolacombe?"
There may be morning classes for these groups, which could be held equally well in their home country, but if they spend their leisure time abroad in groups of their own nationality, they're going to learn next to nothing of the foreign language, because they've been denied TOTAL IMMERSION.
Total immersion in a foreign language is very, very scary for a teenager, but is THE ONLY way to gain fluency quickly. My French-teacher mother sent me, aged 13, for two weeks to stay with a French family near Marseille. I had only basic schoolboy French and I was terrified. By the time she picked me up from the airport two weeks later, I was fluent. Sure, my vocabulary was probably limited to teenager- and domestic French, but I was fluent. I could express myself as readily in French as in English. By the end of two weeks' total immersion, I even DREAMT in French.
If parents wish to send their offspring on language summer schools abroad, fine, but they should be made aware that what they're paying for is a FUN HOLIDAY of very limited educational value.
Discuss.
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