Job Discussion Forums

[da teacha]

After 4 years on the grind, I've given up on teaching for schools and have started my own operation, supplemented for the time being with a little bit of part-time work.

So far it's going well. I've found some hard-working students who pay well and don't cancel, and I find myself putting far more effort into their lessons; knowing that if I don't perform, they walk, and that nobody is taking a huge cut out of what I'm earning.

Teaching individuals and however, is not something which is really touched upon in typical (and substandard) teaching qualifications and various INSETT sessions schools provide, so I've been left on my own to see what's what, and know I need to improve upon what I do.

I'm hoping to get a bit of discussion going on how to be successful in offering private lessons and offering the best service as possible to those who want lessons.

I've got a few questions to get the ball rolling:

The Teaching Side of Things

1. What should I do with a student's initial needs analysis? Should I go ahead and design a course for 24 lessons or so? Or should I take it as it comes and plan lessons on a lesson-by-lesson basis?

2. Should I be insistent in lessons on actually teaching something, when the student seems like he just wants to chat away for 2 hours? I mean, of course I don't mind, but I'm guessing such students are going to realise they're making no progress after a while and drop off.

3. How can I mill drill target language to get it to stick in students head? Repeating things over and over with privates gets boring quickly and they clock on to what's happening. Same goes for role plays which could do with 3 people (introducing others, reported speech, etc).

4. I usually take notes during the lesson on new vocab, errors and uses of good language. But often these notes can get quite big, very quickly. Should I adapt a deep and narrow approach, whereby I choose the most important/common errors and plan a lesson(s) on plugging it, or perhaps take a shallow and wide approach, whereby I try and deal with many mistakes they are making very briefly; ensuring they learn the isolated phrase and hopefully eventually learn the grammatical pattern (does this tie in with the lexical approach?).


The Business Side of Things
1. I'm considering putting together a site which lists my 'products' and gives details on them, as well as containing pages on self study advice, some example lesson plans, etc. Would this look too cheesy or too impersonal and scare away some students?

2. Additionally, I was thinking of providing students with a notebook, a little self study guide, business card and little leaflet about what else I can offer - to try and keep them 'locked in' and hopefully spread the word. Again, is this going too far?

3. Is it worth trying to go legit and start up a company? Or is it just too much hassle for relatively little gain?

4. And maybe most importantly, has anybody had any success in approaching companies out of the blue and organising lessons? If so, how did you go about it, and what do they need to hear?


Sorry about the lengthy post. If anybody could give a few little pointer it'd be greatly appreciated. Would be great to see a successful thread take off with lots of good ideas being thrown around.

[spiral78]

Quite a few of the answers to your questions will depend upon where and whom you want to teach.

[fluffyhamster]

Hi Da Teacha. I've taught one-to-one lessons within eikaiwa (English conversation schools in Japan) and in the business arm of the equivalent in China, so although they weren't quite "real" privates, they were hopefully similar enough for my advice to be reasonably valid. (I did teach a few non-profit privates here and there though).

Personally I wouldn't start offering seriously ongoing private lessons until I'd developed the general content sufficiently to last for however long it might take to get a student from level A to B. But hey, needs must, and at least you're asking, which as you say could lead to a good thread.

It might help if you choose a conversation-based textbook or two to act as a back-up. Perhaps something like Side by Side for lower levels, and Interchange for going on intermediates. It's not so much that you have to use such books, or that students need to buy them, but if you've at least alluded to them in initial meetings/interviews with prospective students, it won't come as a total surprise were you to occasionally crack them out (when a bit short of material, say, and for which nothing better could be found in time). That being said, I don't know how inimical students in your neck of the woods might be to any apparently structured or dare I say grammar-based learning. (The trick is to try to make things lexicogrammatical - e.g. flesh out plain or hazy tense-like structures with the full range of verbs appearing in them. The COBUILD grammar pattern books, and online corpora such as the BNC at BYU, are useful for stuff like this. Ask if you want a crash course on using the BYU corpora and I can link you to a few notes I posted about it). I'd also suggest investing in a few books on Conversation Analysis, and a good learner dictionary with CD-ROM, for getting ideas about types of conversation and the range of functions~exemplars therein. (I've mentioned a number of such books in my posts).

How much you now plan ahead for an individual student will come down to a number of factors: their aims and enthusiasm, yours LOL, how much older stuff you have available and can adapt etc. I'd say plan ahead as far as you can, even if it's only the barest or most conjectural of notes. And even if that student bails, there will likely be somebody similar with whom you can use or re-adapt this stuff.

Perhaps rather than explicitly teach, instead try to subtly demonstrate (especially if it's conversation~-al skills as the goal). You can take your immediate or later cue from things they can't quite do or do badly, or instead try something straight off the bat as the start of any "chat lesson". It's then just a simple matter of breaking "genuine chat persona" for an instance with a slightly more teacherly "So, I just chatted about X, now it's your turn to try! Try to think of a similar episode in your life. I can repeat the episode I just related/my chat turn, if you like...OK then, now listen more closely..." (You then stress the key phrases etc). If the student(s) fail to be sufficiently fluent when given the chance at these longer sorts of turns, I'm sure they won't mind a bit of drilling on whatever are the trickier individual items. And a fair few functional phrases may re-appear again later, in conversations that have a similar chat "set-up". Anyway, I've rambled about my one-to-one conversation "methodology" a few times before (with a few examples of "grammar" worked into chatty form etc), if interested ask if searching draws a blank.

I should dig out my copy of Peter Wilberg's One to One and try to provide a potted read of it - have you heard of this book? Might be worth getting. I read once or twice that it's "dated", but there haven't been (m)any alternatives over the years.
http://www.onestopenglish.com/business/teaching-approaches/teaching-one-to-one/methodology/

By the way, will the study advice pages etc you're considering putting online be English-only, or bilingual?

Lastly, threads like the following, a recent one on discussion activities for adults, might be useful (assuming you haven't read it already):
http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic.php?t=98373

[scot47]

I feel that the diffreences between Saudi Arabia, Korea and Hong Kong for example are so great that you cannot generalise on this.

[fluffyhamster]

Well, perhaps you could quickly tell us the pitfalls or otherwise of those places, Scot47, if you're not comfortable with generalizing. (There's sure to be somebody who might be considering teaching privately in them one day, even if it isn't the OP). I take your and Spiral's point though that it would help if Da Teacha said where he or she is currently teaching, or intends to teach in the future.

[da teacha]

Thanks a lot fluffyhamster for the great reply. Much appreciated.

I usually work from my laptop, show students the PDFs of different books I'll be using, and email/print relevant pages before classes. Having the physical copies would definitely look nice however, and give that extra little professional touch.

I've recently been introduced to using corpora to improve writing skills, though am a bit slow on actually using corpora in lessons beyond bringing it up and giving a few tips on use in a 10 minute self-study skills slot at the end of lessons. If you have a few notes to copy over, that'd be great!

The 'chat into language focus into a brief bit of practice' technique is what I'm practically doing at the moment most of the time. I'm just a little worried that it's not the most efficient way of doing things, as students are likely to just speak about/using what they already know, and lead the conversation in such a way that they're avoiding more complexes use of language.

Anyways, I'll take a dive into your old posts, see if anything pops up, and thanks again for the response.

[/quote]

[fluffyhamster]

You're very welcome, DT!

I dug out the following, about how to use the BNC @ BYU, because I remembered it's over on the Teacher Discussion part of the site (which requires separate registration), and thus wouldn't appear in the JD forums' search results.
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewtopic.php?p=41753#41753

With the chat methodology, the onus is on us teachers to research and introduce new topics, notions, functions, and suitable exponents/exemplars. Most students won't find them, or at least not as broad and assured a range, by themselves! Often you will need to lead students up the (garden) path, and expose a hole in their powers of expression. And although it may appear inefficient, it seems the "few" items the students go through each time really do get acquired (deeply learnt) better. Don't be scared of repeating your demos, and letting them have more than a few tries themselves at something. Ultimately it's a bit like a big game of Chinese whispers, except no whispering is involved (unless you're impersonating Richard Gere LOL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3YH5USzz14 ).