Laura and Alexis would like to offer you the opportunity to live with them and share their daily interactions in the language. Assisting them will be Jade and Melody who are totally bilingual being the product of the union between native French and native English parents.
For a learner the immersion phase in the language learning process will really catapult your learning ahead, particularly if you communicate exclusively in the target language, and ditch your mother tongue.
One is then immersed in the language, and surrounded by the culture of the target language-speaking community.
Living with a host family will further bolster this learning process, and give you further insights into the mentality of the culture.
In reality it is very unlikely for people to really become fluent in a language without extensive periods of some form of total language immersion.
One sees and feels the language in its natural environment, and the learner sees, hears, feels and ‘lives the language’, seeing expressions, words and phrases in context, complete with the physical movements, facial expressions, hand motions and tone of voice.
The mind has the ability to learn the patterns and structure of a language when surrounded by it.
Language learning is a tool to communicate.
- Correct yourself, get others to correct you.
- Use hand signals, or English if you get stuck.
- Just let it flow over you, for as long as it takes.
Then keep talking.
After a period of exposure, particularly where the student has made a conscious positive decision to have an open mind and to learn the language, all the hundreds, and thousands of words, phrases, conversations, expressions start beginning to make sense.
One will recognize more and more of the repeating patterns in greetings, small talk, and chit-chat.
If you go into a total immersion situation much of it will start clicking into place.
Combining your learning with some structured tuition, language teaching textbooks, courses etc. will accelerate the learning process, and reinforce much of what is learned when in conversation.
Avoid speaking your mother tongue
In the total immersion situation one should avoid speaking one’s mother tongue, and start talking to yourself in your head in the target language.
The more that you can exclude yourself from your mother tongue the better.
The longer the period of total immersion, the more effective it will be.
Every day you have something new to explore and to do, so that you get constantly exposed to real life situations.
Though you might have a good grasp of the language, when it comes to real life conversations you may be using clumsy constructions, bad pronunciation and inappropriate words and, because people are basically polite, THEY WON’T CORRECT YOU, as long, of course, as you’ve made some kind of sense.
Living with a truly bilingual family in an everyday environment you will be gently encouraged to use the correct expressions.