Whether you are choosing a language tutor for a child, for an adult or for a group, there are several considerations that you may want to bear in mind when it comes to finding the right person for you. Here are some ideas for you if you are looking for someone to tutor a child:
If you need a tutor for someone under the age of 18 then do ask for their DBS check if you will be leaving your child alone with them.
Consider carefully whether you would be better to have tuition at your home or at the tutor’s premises. Most professional tutors will be unwilling to be left alone with a child in the child’s own home. At Language Learners we insist on an adult being present on the premises for any child under the age of 14.
Match your tutor to your needs. If you would like your 8-year-old to have a little booster then you may be fine with a University student. However, if your child has specific additional learning needs or is studying for an exam then it may be a good idea to pay extra for someone who has more experience of that situation!
The GCSE curriculum and exam methods have changed in the last few years, especially with the changes made during the Covid lockdowns – so University students DID NOT sit the same exam that your child will be taking. If you need to be boosting grades, then ask your tutor questions about how they have kept their knowledge up-to-date.
Have reasonable expectations of what you will be paying. Remember that the minimum wage for someone over 24 is £9.50 per hour (April 2022). With a good tutor you are not just paying for the one hour of the class, but also for the time they spend planning and marking homework. It can take quite some time to plan a student-specific scheme of work to boost that particular student’s grades in the time available. As a rough guide, prepare for the cost of the tutor to be similar to the cost of a 1:1 session with a physiotherapist or personal trainer at the gym.
If your tutor is just going over the same material that was covered in school, using the same books and worksheets, then it is time for another tutor. They should be adding value by bringing different/more resources. Not that you necessarily want lots of different explanations (that’s confusing) but a range of new exercises and challenges will really help to consolidate the information.
Personality. Ensuring that your child gets on well with the tutor and will work nicely for them is a key element. Sometimes two people just don’t get on well, without it being anyone’s fault – so be prepared to review the situation after two or three classes to make sure that both sides are happy.
Teri Fleetwood is the owner of Language Learners and has been providing French and German tutoring to children from age 5 upwards for more than 16 years. Her students consistently exceed expectations at GCSE and A Level through a careful mixture of topic and grammar work as well as a keen attention to exam technique. Language Learners offers in-person tutoring as well as online sessions.
Now that the schools are back, many young people are having their first introductions to a foreign language. Whether your son or daughter is starting out with a friendly, fun-based after-school club; or a more formal secondary school classroom setting, there are a few things that you can do to help your child get to grips with this new challenge and learn more effectively.
Firstly,
no matter what you thought of language lessons at school, PLEASE do not tell
your child that you were rubbish at languages, or that you don’t see the point
of learning them. Even if both thing are
true. If your child is in secondary
school then they have several years of compulsory language-learning ahead of
them, so it would be far better to encourage them to have a good try and see
what they think for themselves.
At least
to start with, learning a new language seems to consist mostly of lists of new
words that you have to learn. Colours,
numbers, parts of the body… the lists seem to go on and on. Many children seem to learn the words just
well enough to get through this week, or the test at the end of the module, and
the cheerfully forget them again. As you
may guess, this is a very short-term strategy that can easily come back to bite
them if they continue the language to GCSE and beyond. Help your child to start a vocabulary book
and encourage them to keep it up, so that they can refer back to it when
needed. Give them little mini-tests or
challenges throughout the year to keep the information fresh. Why not do a treasure hunt using clues
written (at least partially) in the key language? Or play hangman?
At some
point in the learning journey (probably fairly quickly) the subject of grammar
will rear its ugly head. Many adults
recoil in horror at this point, especially those who were educated in the 1970s
and 1980s when there was not such an emphasis on grammar learning in some
sectors. It is important to note that
grammar does not need to be scary, or even hard to learn, as long as it is
something you get a handle on earlier rather than later. Indeed, it can be rather like being given the
decoder so that you can decipher spy messages.
At least, that’s what I tell my children! However, it can be a real chore to have to go
back through old schoolbooks from several years ago in order to find a grammar
explanation and revise the details. It
is a good idea to set up a grammar folder (just an A4 folder, in any colour you
like, with dividers) and to write up each new concept on a sheet of paper to go
in the folder. This is a great way of
revising as well as providing material to revise from in the future.
Homework – were you the type who saved all your homework until the last day before the deadline and then panicked to get it all done in time? Or did you prefer to work methodically, tackling one or two pieces each night so you were never overwhelmed? Well, learning a language can be a bit like that. Of course it is possible to dash off the worksheets and exercises quickly at the last moment, but if you want the information to stick, especially for vocabulary, then you need to have a bit more method.
If you try to learn all your new words in one mammoth session, then it is quite likely that you will forget them all very quickly. Three smaller sessions of, say, 10 minutes each week, are much more likely to be effective. Essentially, “little and often” is best, as each time we practice a new task we get better at doing it. Try to persuade your children to do their vocabulary learning in regular, bite-sized chunks. You could help by testing them, or even just by reminding them.
It may be a bit of an effort to help your child to set these habits at the beginning of their language learning time, but it will almost certainly save time later on and hopefully help to streamline the learning process for them.
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