HOMESTAY IN NORTH AMERICA

WHAT IS HOMESTAY?

It is foreign students living with a North American family to improve their language ability, learn about local culture and form international friendships. This site is dedicated to enriching the homestay experience for host families and homestay students and to assisting homestay program coordinators. Through exploration of issues in homestay, we hope to improve communication and help make homestay a joyful experience for everyone involved. This site will be valuable to you if you are a:

homestay coordinator at a college, language school or high school

host family or interest in learning about becoming a host family

homestay student or interested in becoming a homestay student

We invite you to visit our site and share your own homestay stories by contacting us.. Together, we can work to make every homestay experience a success!

Culture shock hits our family

When our family decided several years ago to host an international student who was coming to North America to learn English, we knew there would be challenges such as communicating with someone whose language is limited and who was unfamiliar with our way of life.

Nevertheless, we were totally unprepared for what happened. Every day when she arrived home from school, our homestay student would go to her room and close the door. Our contact with her would be limited to a few minutes around the dinner table, where she would sit quietly and give short answers to our questions. We didn't realize it at the time, but now know that our student was experiencing severe culture shock.

time color

Eventually, the passage of time enabled the student to adjust, although she never quite felt comfortable in North American culture. Since then, we have hosted several other students and have enjoyed a wide variety of experiences - one student was such a delight that we now have an ongoing friendship with her; another created challenges for us as she tested her new freedoms as a young woman in Canada.

After hosting several students, it was clear to us that both hosts and students needed to be better prepared in order to make the experience a success. Homestay should be a joyful time, where host families and homestay students learn about new cultures and make lifelong friendships. We wanted to help prevent misunderstandings so that these relationships can thrive.

Pencil color We began looking around for material to help everyone get ready for homestay. We quickly discovered that while many homestay programs provided students and hosts with a few pages of local homestay rules, there was no comprehensive guide to homestay. So, we decided to create one.

The result is The Essential Guide for Homestay Students in North America. The 60-page booklet covers everything from adjusting to life with a new family, culture shock and how to make sandwiches and toast. Since its publication in 1998, thousands of students and hosts have used the booklet to help them prepare for homestay.

We hope that you too find the booklet useful and that this website provides valuable information, whether you are a homestay coordinator, host parent or homestay student. We invite you to send us your comments.

For information about some of the issues involved in homestay in North America, please read Homestay Highlights and Hurdles.

The Essential Guide to Homestay Students
265 College Street
Kingston, ON Canada K7L 4M1
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