When you learn a foreign language like English, immersion is crucial; you can't speak with a good accent if you listen or watch a native speaker speaking or talking on Youtube for just a few times per week. However, Law of Diminishing Returns applies. It's not desirable to live with your teacher.
There have been attempts in Vietnam to recreate these kinds of corporation. To take an instance, here are three of them situated in HCMC:
These programs incorporate living in dorms with "English natives," who are also your teachers. The idea was to enable students the linguistic and cultural immersion with English teachers, in order to "improve your communication in the language."
I share a view with this; it's very important that you speak English as much as you can per day. Have I not attended an international school, my English skills would have been as crappy as ever.
However, international schools share no styles with these English homestay programs, and neither does the latter to the former.
In international schools, students become fluent in English because we communicate with a lot of fluent English speakers (especially our teachers), do that for many years such that we turn 50% Westernized, and learn English the way the formal school teaches.
The EHs broke the last part there; they literally have teachers & students under a hut. The consequence of this is casualty kicking in, and leaking into the core of the programs: the actual English classes. Students slack in the classes instead.
The proportion of positive reviews does not substantiate this. Think about it: what do reviewer thinks about an environment that they were so engaged in? It's cognitive bias, and a HL Economics student knows it well.
My overall argument is that these kinds of EHs are not optimal. They broke the formality of classrooms.
About cultural immersion, one can learn as much about a culture and English-speaking reflexes when they enter an English-speaking school, and that's still concrete; people treat it as a school, not their home. There needs to be a distinction.
Of course, there have been home-schooled students who became great. That doesn't apply to Vietnam; kids are forced to go to school, and you barely see anyone home-schooled.
For actually fixing this problem, I suggest to homestay program founders to limit the interactions between students and teachers in common times, however let them interact during breaks.
Moreover, put some god-damn clothes on; the fact that teachers and students wear casual clothes like as they wear as home DOES NOT impose a close environment where interaction is key, but it creates an informal setting instead, which does not setup for serious work, considering the commonly-seen low working attitudes of Vietnamese staffs and students.
~Vincent
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