International education and accommodation blues
Jono Ryan
I’ve been reflecting on Mike’s recent post on English and navigating international education and it got me thinking about the site of many student troubles: their accommodation arrangements. There’s a lot that could be said about living in a student dormitorty or sharing a house with other students—and there are occasional horror stories in both (honestly, the stories I’ve heard!)—but the option I want to focus on is where the student stays with a local host family, known in some places as a homestay, and in others as private home accommodation or cultural immersion housing.
Generally speaking, this is odds-on to be the option most likely to provide the best kickstart in terms of language development and understanding of the local culture. Living and interacting with a family generates a wide range of day-to-day contexts and experiences that are powered by language and in some cases not easily replicated in the classroom: the language of activities such as mealtime and food preparation, of household activities (laundry, dishes), directions, arrangements, requests, and so on. Often, the student is exposed to a spoken delivery style and perhaps vernacular that may be quite different to—and more challenging than—the carefully staged and heavily scaffolded language they hear in class. Typically, they also receive vastly more language input than students living with co-nationals. So, when things go well, the homestay is an enormously rich and rewarding experience.
Ask around, however, and it soon becomes apparent that many arrangements are less satisfactory, and on occasion they verge on the disastrous. Among students, stories circulate about weird families and dreadful food; among host families, stories circulate about weird students and their dreadful behaviour. Which is to say, it isn’t easy. Many homestay students will have little life experience outside their home country and may have only every known their own family’s rules and rhythms of life. Host families inevitably have their own set routines and systems, which they may be prepared to adapt but not to have overturned.
To make it work, it needs good will and effort on both sides.
However, even with the best of intentions, one of the niggly and often corrosive issues is miscommunication. When learning a second language, it is extremely common for there to be a mismatch between what you mean, and how it sounds to a host family. Sometimes the host family will recognise this and brush it off, but other times they’ll take offence, and a sense of resentment may start to build. As a researcher in second language miscommunication, I’ve collected scores of examples over the years. Take the following example:
· A homestay student was talking about how expensive her friend’s accommodation was and said “$400 a week and the room was worse than this”, while pointing towards her own room in the homestay. The family, having recently renovated the room and bought new furniture, felt hurt and insulted.
What the student had intended to express was something like ‘the room wasn’t as good as this’. Her choice of expression caused offence—and quite predictably so—because it contains the conversational implicature that ‘this room is bad (too)’. As language teachers and linguists, the error seems obvious and we can explain it to ourselves and move on; for the typical host family, it triggered an emotional reaction, and they probably lacked the linguistic tools to analyse what had happened. When this happens, neither party recognises it as a miscommunication. The incident seems inexplicable and so a subtle shift can occur in the relationship. When such experiences keep recurring, the effect can be highly corrosive.
But as language teachers and linguists, we can play a role here. When teaching, for years I’ve used ‘miscommunication diaries’ to help students identify and learn from these experiences (see Ryan, 2015). More usefully, I think, schools can educate their homestay families about the inevitability of miscommunication, provide examples, and demonstrate some tools rethinking our sudden reactions to what may be innocent missteps in a new language.
Let me know if you’ve had any similar experiences or thoughts on how to help.
References
Ryan, J. (2015). Reconstructing miscommunications for the language classroom. ELT Journal, 69(4), 405-414. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccv016