3 Reasons to do a Home Stay
Watch the video as you read along with the script for listening practice:
Hi, my name's Gary, and I'm with North American Study Tour. We are an organization that provides short-term study programs for Japanese university students. North American Study Tour has been around for many many years--seventeen years. And we've taken over a thousand students on home stay programs to the United States and Canada. I myself lived in Japan for almost twenty years and I was a Junkyoju （准教授）in the Kousaieigo Gakubu（国際英語学部） at Chukyo University. One of my responsibilities was to take students on Kaigaikenshuu (海外研修). I would often take them to Singapore, to Australia, to America for short-term three-week study tours. And so I have a lot of experience doing short-term programs for Japanese students. Today, I want to talk about three important and good reasons to do a study tour.
The first reason is you get to learn about a new place. Obviously when you travel, you see many new things and have many new experiences. You meet new people and you learn about their home and so it's very interesting to learn about new cultures.
Uh, the second benefit of doing a program like this is you get to learn about yourself. When you go to a new country it's natural to compare the new country with your country. You compare the new with the old. You compare Canada with Japan, and by comparing, you realize things about yourself that maybe you didn't think about before.
Um, there are differences of course. When you go to a restaurant in Canada, you notice differences between restaurants in Japan. For example, tipping. Right? Tipping doesn't exist in Japan, but in American and Canadian restaurants you have tipping. Probably you notice that the portion size the amount of food you get is much greater in North America than in Japan. Uh, when you stay with a host family you notice differences about Japanese houses and Canadian or American houses. For example, uh bathrooms in North America tend to have a shower and toilet next to each other, but in Japan they’re separate rooms. Uh, furniture tends to be bigger in North America than is in Japan. And houses in general are also bigger, so just little differences between Japan and North America.
Of course in North America, many people will ask you questions about Japan. "Tell me about Japan!" They're very interested to know. So by talking about Japan it makes you think about how to explain your lifestyle and you realize things about yourself. So you can learn about yourself in addition to learning about a new place.
Now the third reason that's good to do language study and home stay program is that it increases your language fluency. Now in Japan you have studied a lot of English, right? You study English at university, you studied English at high school, maybe you studied English at junior high school, or went to a language school, like ECC. You have a lot of grammar and vocabulary in your head. You have a lot of it, you’ve studied it for many years, but what you don't have in Japan is practice speaking, right? You don't get enough speaking practice. So what you already know is difficult to say because you don't have enough speaking practice.
Now speaking is like playing the piano. When you first start to play the piano your hands are very slow. They move slowly across the keyboard. But by practicing they get faster and faster and faster, and speaking is the same way. The more you have practice speaking, the faster you become. So these home stay programs give you a lot of practice speaking and even though there are only three weeks, you can raise your fluency a lot.
Of course you have five hours of English class every day. And you do lots of speaking, and other types of activities. But additionally outside of class you get a lot of practice. For example, in Canada you visit a Canadian university and you meet Canadian students who study Japanese. And so they can tell you about Canada practicing their Japanese and you can tell them about Japan practicing your English. You meet friends who are your own age and you can talk to each other and practice your language skills.
At the end of class you go home to your host family. Of course you talk to your host mother, your host father, your host brother and sister in English every day. You get lots of practice. We go to elementary schools where you can teach children, uh, about Japan, about Japanese culture maybe Japanese calligraphy, origami, uh games like kendama, or traditional Japanese clothing and dress. So you can teach little kids in English about Japan. We go to senior centers you meet older Canadians who ask you questions about Japan and you have to speak. So, on these tours you get a lot of speaking practice and like practicing the piano you get faster and your fluency increases.
Now, I would take my students at Chukyo overseas to Australia and all these other places and in three weeks their fluency and their confidence became much higher. So even three weeks of practicing speaking every day will make you a more fluent English speaker. So it’s very good. So again, three good reasons to do a study tour. One, you learn about a new place. Two, you learn about yourself. And three, you can raise up your English fluency. It is very very good for those things.
Now with the NAST tour you can also do an optional fourth week of sightseeing. Um, a fourth week addition usually consists of New York City, Washington DC and several days at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, so if you want to add a fourth week, uh we have sightseeing options. So you get a lot of language study, a lot of culture study, and the opportunity to see many new places. So it's a very exciting tour. So if you are interested in doing a NAST tour, please visit our home page. It’s www.nasthomestay.org that's www.nasthomestay.org
I hope to see you again. I hope to see you on one of our tours. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.