The Language Assistant Program offers students who have studied at least four semesters at a university or at a teacher training university the opportunity to work as Modern Language Assistants (MLAs) in the United Kingdom for up to nine months.

MLAs usually teach their native language (French or German) to anglophone students, and they can choose to work at elementary, high-school, or college level.

The workload amounts to 12–16 hours per week; the gross monthly salary fluctuates between approximately £900 and £1,100 for 12 hours depending on the region, plus a single allowance financed by the partner agency Movetia of approximately 2300 CHF.

While host institutions are not required to provide accommodation, most of them tend to help MLAs find reasonably priced accommodation relatively close to the school grounds.

During the application process, future MLAs can state their preferences in terms of duration (six, eight or nine months) and placement (England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland; big city, suburb, small town, countryside), but both duration and placement of the assistantship are jointly defined by Movetia and the British Council.

Movetia also provides guidance on the UK visa application process and on how to obtain a certificate of visa sponsorship from the British Council.

Here is what one of our doctoral student has to say about the LAP exchange; Simone Camponovo writes:

After obtaining my MA degree in English and French Literature, I worked as a French language assistant at St. Alban’s Catholic High School and Sixth Form College in Ipswich, Suffolk, during the academic year 2023-2024.

I mainly taught sixth-form students aged 16–18 who were preparing their French A-Levels, but I also occasionally worked alongside my mentor teacher and other colleagues with high-school students aged 12–16. In most cases, my tasks revolved around the improvement of the students’ oral skills and of their knowledge of francophone literature and culture.

During my stay I had the chance to live with fellow Spanish teacher at St. Alban’s – and now good friend – Grace in a white, semi-detached house with creaky, steep stairs and cozy rooms filled with Spanish painted pottery and wrought-iron decorations. Grace toured me around Suffolk, introduced me to her friends and, within less than a month from my arrival, I found myself waiting for a fireworks display in her family friends’ garden holding a sparkler in one hand and strong tea in the other.

I cannot say that I would list Ipswich among my favourite English towns, nor Suffolk among my favourite counties, but I met funny, lovely people among the language assistants who were, like me, lost in rural East Anglia. It is with them that I travelled – with little money, but a lot of creativity – across the whole country.

As commonplace as this might sound, this assistantship has been a source of kaleidoscopic memories:

• Hearing scraps of conversations around me as I crossed the Thames, on my way to Shakespeare’s Globe, and feeling mesmerised by London’s multiculturalism;
• Sharing an international dinner with other language assistants in a cottage in the Highlands, each of us cooking a dish from our home country;
• Stroking a hairy coo behind her ears on the Isle of Skye;
• Seeing our dinner table turn into a stage for two Irish dancers in a deconsecrated church in Dublin;
• Leaving the mainland by boat to reach St. Michael’s Mount and walk my way back to the Cornish coast on a slippery cobblestone path during low tide;
• Being followed by a fox through the Lanes of Brighton;
• Watching seals bounce against each other on a beach of the North Wales coast;
• Being offered a cup of tea by a retired French teacher who now runs a guest-house in Whitby for no other reason than that I had said “Hi” to her cockapoo;
• Being surprised by a storm in the middle of a walk on the top of the Seven Sisters cliffs;
• Smelling parchment and dust in the Bodleian Library in Oxford and hearing the creak of wooden floors in Chetham Library in Manchester.