Need Assessment Ideas for First Classes w/ Private Students

[Lauren23]

Hello to everyone,

I live abroad teaching EFL, and am in the process of starting to break away from working for institutes and other companies, etc., and just teach independently for myself. I am even going to set up my own website. I would like everything to be of the utmost level of professionalism.

Part of my idea to demonstrate to my potential students (which will probably be private, individual students) that I "mean business" is to give them about an hour or so of a free lesson for our first meeting, in which I would assess them and their level of English proficiency, and their motivations and needs for learning the language.

I have a general idea of what I would like this assessment to include- the 4 main components of language learning (reading, writing, listening, and speaking). But in terms of specific questions to ask and what resources to use, I am completely stumped.

Also, because I might be tutoring children as well as adults, I know that I would not use the same material for everyone.

Additionally, from very early on, one can tell if a student would fall into a range of basic, intermediate, etc., and there's no point in evaluating a potentially advanced student with material that asks him or her to conjugate the present simple (I hope that makes sense). What I mean is that I would ideally like to have more than just one "one-size-fits-all" form of assessing my students.

Any and all ideas (including books, online, resources, anything and everything!) are extremely welcome! Thank you!

-L

[danielwelsch]

What I do to evaluate the level my private students have is to ask them questions in a variety of verb tenses and see if I can get them to respond in the same tense (or an appropriate one.)

If they try to answer everything in present, well, then I know they don't have a very high level. If you want you can tell them in advance what you're doing and why, so they know you're evaluating them. Sometimes it's counterproductive though.

After that I base everything on what they need. If they need to read scientific articles, we do that, if they need to talk, we do that.

I always ask for feedback to see if they find what we're doing useful or if there's something else more useful (to a certain extent you know what's useful at least as well as they do, but you should definitely take their opinions into account).

Good luck!
Daniel.