Family and Junior
Language Vacations

Above: After a week or two of studying French in France, your children could get acquainted with Gallic girls and boys like these.

Archived Article
Dateline: 2001

Are children keeping you from trying a language vacation, or from visiting Europe? There may be an easy solution: Take the kids along and let them learn a new language, too--or enroll them in a European language program while you enjoy La Dolce Vita with your spouse.

I asked Christine Coté of Language Studies Abroad to send me a list of LSA language schools with junior programs. She gave me two: a list of schools where parents and children could study a language at the same time during any session, and a list of schools that had "junior only" sessions. (There's some overlap between the lists, because a few schools go to into "junior only" mode for only part of the summer or year.)

1. Simultaneous adult and junior sessions:

Austria: Vienna*.

France: Antibes*, Nice.

Italy: Treviso.

Spain: Madrid*, Marbella*, Salamanca, Sevilla.

* Same school for adults and children, but different campuses. 

2. "Junior only" sessions:

Austria: Vienna.

France: Antibes, Arcachon, Biarritz, Paris (Melun), Montpellier, Nice, Saint-Malo.

Germany: Berlin (Schmuckwitz), Munich (Grun & Passau).

Italy: Treviso, Lignano.

Spain: Madrid, Marbella, Salamanca, Sevilla.

Notes:

• Age requirements for junior programs vary from school to school; most have a lower age limit of 8 or 10, with a maximum age of 16 or 18.

• My daughter attended language camp for 10 years and loved it. (Since heading off to college, she has studied Norwegian in Norway and worked as a counselor in a Norwegian language camp.) If your children are intelligent and open to new experiences, attending a junior language program--whether abroad or at home--can be both academically worthwhile and great fun.

For more information on European lanuage schools and their junior programs, search Google for "language schools in Europe" or "language study abroad."

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