Are most tutors useless for advanced learners?

[s_allard]

In another thread a contributor stated that "Most tutors are absolutely useless, when it comes to advanced learners and the exams." Rather than be accused of kidnapping that thread, I decided to start a new one on this specific topic.

I am of the totally opposite opinion. I believe that tutors are an absolutely necessity for advanced learners and especially for exam preparation. First, let me say that in my opinion the category tutors includes three kinds of resources:

1. Teachers who follow a formal program.
2. Tutors who provide interaction and corrective feedback with technical explanations.
3. Language buddies or exchange partners who provide conversation and some correction.

The cost goes from high to low or even free along the same lines. I'll exclude the teachers of category 1 in this discussion. My experience is that as one progresses in proficiency the performance mistakes become more and more subtle and difficult to self-correct. Good pronunciation and fluency can easily hide mistakes that usually derive from the interaction with L1. And often there are little nagging doubts about words that resemble each other. In Spanish it's things like the difference between contraer and contratar, despachar and despechar.

And the thing about speaking at a really high level is that you want to speak perfectly or at least with the fewest mistakes. If you are an A2 speaker, your mistakes are easily forgiven because they are so many. But at the C1 and C2 levels those little mistakes stand out because everything else is so good. This is what we see in our native language. Sure, we make mistakes but we correct them on the spot.

Another problem is how to develop natural-sounding idiomatic speech. In other words, how would a native speaker say what I want to say? Because we tend to translate a lot, our speech may be perfectly grammatical but this is not how a native speaker would speak. This is especially true with the use of idiomatic expressions and formulaic language.

In these cases, a tutor makes all the difference in the world. There is nothing like having somebody point out the mistakes that you usually don't even notice. If mistakes are not corrected, you will repeat them.

As for developing a natural feel for the language, a tutor is absolutely wonderful because you can learn so much from the tutor's own speech in addition to explicit recommendations. Just hearing how the tutor says things can be very useful.

I just don't understand this idea of trying to do everything all alone. It seems to me that language is all about communication and interaction with other people. I having nothing against speaking to oneself for practice but I'm not learning a language to speak to myself. Why not take practice speaking with other people? And it doesn't have to be expensive. I wonder what other people think.

P.S. I haven't touched exam preparation that I'll revisit later.

[jsmith12]

My experience with informal tutoring has been that most tutors aren't very useful after B1 level or so--unless you're willing to do some extra work. What I mean by that is that most tutors are just happy to have a conversation and give occasional corrections--useful if you're reluctant to speak--but after you reach a level where you can have fluent conversations (around B2), you won't make much progress with these kinds of conversations.

I think you can make it work for you if you pick a topic ahead of time, research that topic in your TL, note vocab, and then have a conversation using your notes, and perhaps even write a summary of the conversation afterwards.

[neofight78]

I wonder what other people think.

I agree 110% with what you say. For my experience talking with immigrants in my own country, many speak English excellently and freely on almost any subject. Yet for a lot of them there are a lot of persistent mistakes that don't prevent understanding but do give them away as non-native. That in itself is no catastrophe, but what is important is that I'm certain they are stuck in low paying jobs simply because employers don't feel that they are able to trust them to answer the phone, write reports, emails to customers etc. (Whether that is justified or not is separate discussion). I'm certain for most of them they stopped receiving corrections a long time ago because formal study ended in school and we British are too polite to correct people. They don't themselves see these mistakes, because the are successfully communicating with no indication that there are problems with grammar or word usage.

So whilst everybody tells me that my Russian is "good enough", I know that in a work environment I will always be disadvantaged until a get to a high level. Somewhere between B2 and C1 won't cut it. In my journey so far corrections have been invaluable, and I realised that I've been making less use of them recently so I'm taking steps to correct that.

There are many reasons why it's hard to find a good tutor. I suspect perhaps the main reason may be that a tutor who really pushes you to better will make you feel uncomfortable. A lot of people don't like this feeling. I see this with Karate. So few people start as adults because they can't stand going through the initial phase where you can't do even the most basic thing properly and you feel like a right plonker. Sooner or later for a lot of people it becomes too much and they drop out. Children suffer much less from this and tend to stick with it more. So I think light correction with compliments about your level is probably good business but bad pedagogy. I think Thomas Merton said something like "We don't like to be beginners, but we have to face up to the fact we will be beginners for the whole of our lives.". I think this could easily be applied to language learning.

[leosmith]

I think tutors can be useful at all stages, but it depends on how you prefer to learn. For example, people who want to read and listen for a few years before doing anything else aren't going to be using a tutor during that time. On the other hand, some people prefer to do everything under the instruction of a caring teacher.

Personally, I only use tutors for conversation practice in the beginning. To me, it makes little sense to try to learn pronunciation and grammar with a tutor. And I don't find correction to be helpful at all in the early stages of conversation. On the other hand, when I get to a strong B2 level, a discussion about grammar and some correction can be quite effective.

[Cavesa]

As I am the quoted person, I would like to answer now, early in the thread.

MOST (I am not saying all, but surely majority) tutors are not useful to advanced learners for these reasons listed below.I believe that not having a tutor is much better than wasting time and money with a bad one. That it is worth it to take sample lessons and not be shy about refusing further lessons. It is necessary to be a very active participant, with lots of self-study, and with very clear demands about the content and methods used. It is not easy to find one of the exceptions, and sometimes it is not easy to know until it is quite late.

1.They are not used to advanced learners, as vast majority of the market are beginner and intermediate students. Therefore, they simply don't know how to adapt to an advanced learner. They tend not to know what to teach such a learner.

2.They are not strict enough. It has something to do with number 1. (they are used to beginners and intermediates who need to start talking at all), but I think a more important root of this problem is the widely spread idea about language learning being unpleasant and therefore learners being in need of constant encouragement, even at the cost of quality of the corrections or slower pace of the progress.

This has been my main disappointment after my last tutor experience. Overall, the lessons weren't bad, after I finally convinced him it wasn't worth it to do fill in the gaps grammar exercises or listening practice together, even though there was still tendency to introduce some intermediate tasks. The writing corrections were good and that was the main point of getting a tutor, as he was the only available resource on the French academic writing style required. The speaking practice was pleasant but there were very few corrections. Far too few. I was genuinely convinced the reason were my skills, and focused just on my objectively worse writing. I felt really disappointed only after getting some real life feedback on my speaking. I got a very high speaking score in my C2 exam, yes. But I hadn't improved my speaking at all during the lessons and I still have an accent that should have been addressed. He hadn't mentioned it even once. When I realized it, it immediately felt as if at least one third of the invested money had been wasted. I would have worked much harder on my pronunciation and accent, if only someone gave me the feedbacks tutors are supposed to be miraculous at. Nope. And I feel highly discouraged to pay someone again for what I had already paid once.

3.Most teachers and tutors seem genuinely surprised by existence of hard working, motivated students. They tend to insist on doing activites that can easily be done on one's own, or on explaining easy stuff, and it takes too much paid time to convince them otherwise. There is an obvious distrust towards students, concerning homework, practice, self-study. Yes, you are likely to find many clueless or lazy students in beginner classes. But someone already at or beyond B2 willing to pay for 1 on 1 classes is unlikely to be clueless or lazy.

4.Too little encouragement or even discouragement from using large amounts of content for natives. While we may disagree on the best ways to use it, this whole forum seems to agree on the fact such content is necessary. Yet, teachers keep telling their students such stuff would be too hard, or they convince people to use only some very specific kinds of content, such as the news. They fail to recommend appropriate books, and usually just repeat a list of classics, if anything at all. I know university students majoring in a language, who are not required to read the obligatory literature in the original language, which they should know at the C1 or C2 level, so it is obviously a widely spread problem. Not being able to give advice is not so bad, there are other sources of info. But active discouragement is harmful and actually very common. We've had a thread about one article labeling tv series as useless on the forum quite recently.

5.Just like in every field, there are people genuinely interested in the job, doing their best and with a certain talent for it, and then there are the others. Teaching foreign languages unfortunately has a few specifics attracting many "others". Lots and lots of tutors are natives with a short teaching course as their only qualification. Listen to them for a while, ask them about their journey. They usually started teaching just for the lifestyle. Not because of a burning desire to teach, not because of discovering a talent for teaching, not because of having a passion for the language.

English is the most obvious example. The worldwide demand for any teachers, especially natives, created easy ways into the field, and as well the incentives like living abroad, and being paid for being a native. Some teachers will even admit it like "I didn't like my career and I wanted to travel, so I took the CELTA and became a teacher." Unfortunately, many people with a teaching degree from a university are no better. In my country (but I heard about similar situation in others), the prestige of teaching degrees has been dropping over the last two or three decades. The people "choosing" them are doing so just because they have very few other options. People teaching after completing a different language degree are usually those who didn't get a different job with languages. That creates a huge amount of people with little chance to become great teachers.

Imagine a world, in which people could get some medicine certificate after a few months long requalification course, and then they'd immediately get a well paid medical job anywhere on the planet. And regular medicine students would be mostly those refused by the other faculties for being lazy and/or not gifted enough. Of course there would still be good doctors around. But the ratio of good vs bad doctors would surely change with the influx of bad ones, wouldn't it? The idea seems ridiculous on this example, as there would be many dead corpses as a result, but it seems perfectly normal in the language teaching industry.

6.It is harder to teach advanced students, as their needs are much more varied. You can certainly teach dozens of beginners the same stuff, following the same course, and the result will fulfill the expectations. But now you get an advanced student. An individual with a learning background you have limited information about, with their particular needs (an exam, a job, weaker at one skill while being stronger at another), and with experience based preferences concerning your teaching methods.

Now, take into accout the problem described in point 5. You have a usual tutor, who gets by, if they can teach stuff they have experience with. If they can teach stuff they have already covered with a few dozen students before. Stuff they were taught to teach. If they can stick to a coursebook or at least some generic curriculum made by someone more experienced. When it comes to an advanced student, they cannot. They don't have experience with dozens of advanced learners (those are rarer on the market, as I said in point 1). And there are very few C1 and even fewer C2 courses available. In many cases, the learner may even be better than the "tutor". (a thought based on a recent experience of my younger sister. Even the beginers could tell the mistakes their "teacher", a Croatian native, was making. That is an extreme example. But there actually are non native tutors who should still be learners, if they were honest with themselves. They may still be useful to beginners but hardly to an advanced learner)

There are rare jewels among the tutors, who have experience with the high level learners and exams, for example the examiners. And a part of them happens to be a good teacher on top of that. Those have a very good idea about the level, obviously some education concerning advanced learners, and experience. (And higher prices for obvious reasons.) The rest is learning to teach high level students, and eventually prepare them for the exams, by simply trying. That is ok for their thirtieth student, not so much for the third or fouth one. The exams seem to be the only area, where advanced learners and curricula are being addressed at all. Most language schools teach only A1-B1 or B2 levels, some of them C1. C level coursebooks are rare, especially if you don't count the exam preparatory books. There is one advanced French coursebook. I know of another based in Czech.

If the language teaching industry seems to pretend there are no advanced learners, people just move to the country and than sit an exam, why should most tutors be good at teaching this "non existent" public?

[Cavesa]

.

So whilst everybody tells me that my Russian is "good enough",
...
There are many reasons why it's hard to find a good tutor. I suspect perhaps the main reason may be that a tutor who really pushes you to better will make you feel uncomfortable. A lot of people don't like this feeling.

I am not sure, perhaps this could be a cultural thing too. When it comes to French, it were always the teachers telling me my level was good enough or even excellent. Sometimes, it was a good thing, I would have taken just C1 DALF otherwise. But it is simply wrong, when it means not pointing out smaller mistakes. It is a problem, if it means assuming the learner has hit their ceiling and it is not worth it to push him harder.
And the reality clash were the natives making fun of my accent (happened a few times during my Erasmus) or rudely switching (sometimes even at C2 level, when I am with my family, but that is more a sign of their rudeness than my level. Alone, it used to happen at B2. B2 is far from perfection but still better than the English of most French natives switching at me).

People need to be pushed hard and there are people who avoid this feeling, true. I would agree that might be one of the reasons why realitively few adult learners start a completely new language. But advanced learners are highly unlikely to be too sensitive about it. They have years of experience, when it comes feeling like a beginner. They know they need to be pushed hard (by themselves or others), otherwise they would have never made it so far. An advanced learner cannot be lazy or lack the necessary humbleness, those learners ended much earlier.

The problem is many tutors simply assume the learner would feel uncomfortable and discouraged (and stop taking classes and, more importantly, paying for them), so they avoid causing such a discomfort.

[tarvos]

There are Spanish coursebooks too at the C1-C2 level. Most of them are preparation books for the DELE. I'm working with one of them. Besides that, at C1-C2 coursebooks aren't really that useful in my opinion - except for some specific material based on advanced grammar points, at this level you improve only by personalized, targeted improvement and to be honest with you - if you are C1-C2, then there simply aren't that many coaches available that can handle your requests because it's a level at which most common tutoring strategies are useless.

As for the choice of tutors, at the advanced levels the tutor game is different as well because you're simply not looking for the same type of person teaching you. Your needs aren't the same, so you simply shouldn't be using the tutors you were before, unless your tutor is so good that they can switch tack based on your needs. Tutors at the C levels need to be strict and stern and they need to push you. I like to liken them to military instructors - every mistake needs to be punished, every little step out of line thrown back into place.

There's also a game of supply and demand at work - for Spanish you'll find something available, for Russian too. For less popular languages you need a few strokes of luck. And even my Czech teacher is way too privy to complimenting me, something not quite necessary, because she's unused to Czech students at advanced levels simply understanding what they need to move forward.

3.Most teachers and tutors seem genuinely surprised by existence of hard working, motivated students. They tend to insist on doing activites that can easily be done on one's own, or on explaining easy stuff, and it takes too much paid time to convince them otherwise. There is an obvious distrust towards students, concerning homework, practice, self-study. Yes, you are likely to find many clueless or lazy students in beginner classes. But someone already at or beyond B2 willing to pay for 1 on 1 classes is unlikely to be clueless or lazy.

Hah. My Spanish tutor is surprised when I always do all of my homework on time, almost without errors and write complicated texts without fucking up much. And I am always like "if you don't do this kind of thing, you bloody don't improve." And even then, we did an exercise on Spanish prepositions where there were 50 prepositions or so eliminated from a text and I had to make sure I got the right ones. I scored something like 88% without too much effort, and she praised me for my skill - to which I answered "I missed six. That's not quite good enough". And she looked at me with that look of "why are you so incredibly harsh on yourself", even though missing six wasn't such a big surprise - the exercise wasn't that easy. It's because you need to miss zero - not six. I am very loyal and I apply myself because otherwise I don't get better.

That said, she does correct every single mistake, which is good. She doesn't go easy on me. But I have the feeling she is still a little surprised that I always do what I have to do. And I always answer - tell me, who scores the better results? Your other students, or me?

Motivation pays off. I remember one of my young Spanish kids - he had problems with language development and went to remedial classes. But he was incredibly hard-working and probably top of the class at learning English. Why? Because he was very applied, even at six, he always complied with the instructions 100%, and he used his skills to great effect - he had a fantastic memory and he retained vocabulary very fast. He knew that he could use this to his advantage. That's why teachers loved him. I even remember that he had certain issues with spelling certain homophones in Spanish, and when they taught him the rule - he didn't make a single mistake. Why? Because he was clever enough to use the rule (realizing there are rules to how languages work and internalizing them at age six or seven is no mean analytical feat! He used to use it to make new words in English and make educated guesses as to how to say things), and was applied enough to do the practice assigned to him to internalize it. That's correct application, and tutors should realise that these kinds of students also need motivation and encouragement - if you have that kind of skill at six you need to learn to use and harness it, it's a major thing.

[neofight78]

People need to be pushed hard and there are people who avoid this feeling, true. I would agree that might be one of the reasons why realitively few adult learners start a completely new language. But advanced learners are highly unlikely to be too sensitive about it. They have years of experience, when it comes feeling like a beginner. They know they need to be pushed hard (by themselves or others), otherwise they would have never made it so far. An advanced learner cannot be lazy or lack the necessary humbleness, those learners ended much earlier.

The problem is many tutors simply assume the learner would feel uncomfortable and discouraged (and stop taking classes and, more importantly, paying for them), so they avoid causing such a discomfort.

Agreed, I'm not saying it would scare away experienced learners. It's just that the majority of students will be beginners or intermediate, probably not experienced learners. It's more that tutor's don't know that for advanced learners they need to correct more and push students out of their comfort zone. As you mention tutors get into a groove and don't adapt enough to the needs of an individual student especially if he is at a higher level.

[neofight78]

And she looked at me with that look of "why are you so incredibly harsh on yourself", even though missing six wasn't such a big surprise - the exercise wasn't that easy. It's because you need to miss zero - not six. I am very loyal and I apply myself because otherwise I don't get better.

Good point, the strictness and high standards need to come from both sides. I guess at a lower level one would get overwhelmed with one's mistakes, but as a student advances he needs to pick up on his mistakes more and more.

[zenmonkey]

As I am the quoted person, I would like to answer now, early in the thread.

MOST (I am not saying all, but surely majority) tutors are not useful to advanced learners for these reasons listed below. I believe that not having a tutor is much better than wasting time and money with a bad one. That it is worth it to take sample lessons and not be shy about refusing further lessons. It is necessary to be a very active participant, with lots of self-study, and with very clear demands about the content and methods used. It is not easy to find one of the exceptions, and sometimes it is not easy to know until it is quite late.

I agree with the above, in the same way that most math tutors would not have been good at helping me learn partial differential equations.
However, I still found a tutor that was useful, I just needed to look a little differently. Same thing in any field really.

And for language learning I would say that having a tutor while being an advanced student may be highly helpful and motivating. You are under no obligation to stick to a bad tutor. It usually take a few tries to get someone that works well.

If I were to take on the improvement of my advanced languages, I'd likely focus on literature and/or writing composition classes (at a distance?) for my weaknesses and interests. At an advanced level, one needs to know more precisely and communicate better about their own needs.

C level coursebooks are rare, especially if you don't count the exam preparatory books. There is one advanced French coursebook. I know of another based in Czech.

General textbooks are rare for any specific advanced area but you will find several for FLE grammaire or Vocabulaire avancee, Writing exercises, etc...