Teaching in Italki?

[Tristano]

Hi guys,
I'm not sure that this is the right section for this thread (actually I'm surer about the opposite).
I'm thinking about teaching Italian (as tutor) in Italki, but so far I was just in the student position. Have anyone of you had this experience? What did you learn along the way?

[jeff_lindqvist]

Unless I'm mistaken, forum member Tarvos has done hundreds of tutoring sessions on iTalki. I think he has written about it either here or at HTLAL. Hopefully he'll see this thread.

[iguanamon]

Expugnator has tutored Portuguese. You might want to ask him about it. Personally, speaking for myself, I find it difficult to teach my own native language, English from scratch. If I were to attempt teaching English in anything but an informal way, I'd want to learn how to do it. On the other hand, with conversation, I don't have a problem.

[tarvos]

I saw this thread at work but didn't have time to respond (ironically because I was preparing a class... but not an iTalki one). Here's my opinion on the subject:

It's nice for some extra money if you do informal tutoring. You need to be able to do certain things, though:

- you're going to get a lot of beginners without confidence who know nothing/nada/niente of your language. Be prepared to be extremely patient, and to work on clear pronunciation with an accent that isn't too far off the standard. To be a conversational teacher, you need to be encouraging. By this I don't just mean that you need to hand out compliments (although I do that), but also to learn how to correct errors, when to step in during a monologue, and so on.

- You also need to be able to ask probing questions that keep conversations going. I've had shitty classes as a student because the teacher didn't know how to keep the conversation going and there was no atmosphere. I'm not returning to those teachers.

- Don't just switch to English or the common language. Use it sparingly if at all. I use it to explain grammar points or unknown vocabulary in a pinch, but no more.

- Have conversational ideas on hand. As a student, I can direct conversations very well myself, but most students don't know how to do it.

- Be on time.

- Have the time to do it. You need to have a fixed schedule.

- Be prepared to suck during the first 30 classes. My first classes were terrible and it wasn't until I got to the 100 or so mark that it started to get better. I can still do way better, but now I have the ability to keep students.

For professional classes, you need to know a lot more about lesson preparation. You'll need to get the same type of degrees as normal language teachers. I have that status because I am a teacher in real life.

[Expugnator]

Since I started working fulltime I haven't given more than a couple of classes, but it was a great experience. I was lucky most of the times to have students that already had an idea of both the Portuguese language and Brazil itself, so most of the times we'd just chat and I'd send the corrections as text. On the other hand, my tight schedule didn't allow for me to have a sequence of lessons with the same student within a week, for example, so that we could set a lesson plan together. The students would often appreciate how I could associate grammar topics and idiom usages directly between one language and the other and thus set straightforward and intuitive analogies.