by James Mallon

Created on: January 22, 2012   Last Updated: January 23, 2012

Learning another language is a long term commitment, requiring immense dedication to achieve a good level of fluency.  Seeking additional assistance is a logical step for a student struggling with their studies, or simply to have more conversation practise to improve their pronunciation skills.  When looking for a tutor, find a native speaker of your target language and someone armed with a teaching qualification, to demonstrate they have the right skills to support you. 

To employ a person who just speaks the language, but has no teaching experience, will probably not improve the student’s language skills immensely, due to a lack of teaching knowledge or structure. An option, if just seeking conversational practise, is finding someone who would mutually interchange their language with yours.  This would mean talking in English for an hour and then in the other language for a similar time span.  You may not be able to pass on in depth grammar techniques to each other, but you will still have exposure to valuable conversational practise and possibly form a friendship.

Advantages of individual attention may help boost morale, provide a better understanding the subject and help students achieve goals or pass the examinations, they were struggling with in the classroom.  However, to consider engaging a private tutor as a permanent option is not ideal and should not be considered as the magic solution to success, even though it will help immensely.  The social interaction and advantages a high school or college can offer, cannot be surpassed and is also a valuable part of growing up for young students.

A student may seek help from a private language tutor because of difficulties understanding complicated grammar structures or the need to improve pronunciation and conversation for a looming examination.  This individual support is invaluable because the teacher is focussed only on his student and normally in the student’s home environment, where they feel more relaxed. 

Another good reason to seek extra help is when vital lessons are missed.  A classroom teacher does not have time to you teach a student on a one to one basis how to apply the “Past Perfect Indicative”, because he has several class groups and many other students to think about.  It is highly probable no great detail was given to the grammatical intricacies anyway, as the main purpose for language classes is to promote

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