These are all excellent questions! I can only share my own personal experiences, and of course other people may use tutors very differently. But with that disclaimer, here's how I've used tutors.
kuji wrote:Do you go into a tutoring session the first time, knowing exactly what you want, and tell the tutor that, or do you just sign up for a session with nothing in mind and see what happens? Would it be a mistake to go into a session without having something you want the tutor to concentrate on?
Whenever I've contacted tutors, I've definitely done so with some sort of goal in mind: preparing for the DELF B1/B2, improving my conversational skills, or preparing for a French startup conference, just for example.
For me, the first challenge is
finding a good tutor! This usually takes me several tries. For example, when I was preparing for the DELF, I tried bunch of people:
- Several language exchanges, where people either didn't show up, or did show up, but then spent 20 minutes lecturing in an extremely pushy fashion about how this was supposed to work. I've decided that there is zero payoff in scheduling language exchanges with strangers, because people flake out more often that not, and some of the people who do keep their commitments are pretty bitter about it all. Maybe my luck was just awful?
- A tutor in French-speaking Africa who normally worked with students from Asia who needed to pass foreign language exams. He was nice enough, but he was also extremely inflexible, and he wasn't prepared to go outside his course.
- A French woman living in Spain, who had a Masters in language education and who had previously worked for the Alliance française. She was a polyglot: French, English, Spanish and at least one or two more in progress. She also cost twice what the average French tutor cost.
I stuck with (3), and she was amazing. We focused heavily on conversation, particularly on being able to explain and defend my opinions. She'd push me very hard, and she was very good at managing and defusing my frustration. And every week or two, she'd identify one mistake that I made consistently, and insist that I fix it. She pushed me mercilessly to replace my /ɾ/ (long story) with a proper /ʁ/. And all our communication was in French, including grammatical explanations, negotiations over the lesson plans, and so on. (At the same time, I started speaking exclusively French at home, created an AJATT-style "immersion" environment, and wrote 100 words a day for 30 days on lang-8. This is probably why I made it from A2 to B2 in ~4 months.)
More recently, I wanted to prepare for a French startup conference. My old tutor was semi-retired, so once again I went shopping (this time on iTalki), and I explained that I was looking to role-play business conversations. If I remember correctly, here's how it went:
- The first tutor was nice enough, but didn't really seem to understand what I wanted.
- The second tutor was a university student. She claimed to be "native", but she was either hung-over or sleep-deprived, because she spent more time pausing and looking for words than I did.
- The third tutor understood my goals instantly. He played the part of a French entrepreneur, and he acted out many different scenarios: explaining what my company did, asking other people about their companies, and talking about a variety of professional topics. This was exactly what I was looking for, and he just nailed it. Interestingly, he was also about twice as expensive as the average French tutor.
So I guess the moral of this story is that your first few tutors may be duds, but that if you keep looking, you may find somebody amazing. Or perhaps the moral of the story is that if your budget allows it, it's sometimes worth paying extra for languages like French and German, because there are some absolutely amazing professional tutors who won't necessarily work for $10/hour. (This is one of the reasons that those $450 Rosetta Stone packages annoy me so much: For that price, you could buy 15 hours of highly-skilled tutoring, or a huge stack of native media.)
kuji wrote:Also, how does a typical tutoring session go for you? Warm-ups and cool-downs? Dialogue practice? Vocabulary activities? Textbook work? Or just straight conversation? I'd be very interested to hear your experiences.
The two big things I use tutors for are (1) intense, focused conversational practice, and (2) feedback on which mistakes I need to focus on first. I wouldn't use a tutor for textbook stuff, or for anything which I could get from Assimil. I can do that stuff alone and save the money.
kuji wrote:Let me add another question: how often do you do tutoring sessions? What's been holding me back from doing tutoring sessions is that I cannot do a regular schedule. I might have opportunities to do one or two sessions one week, then no opportunities for the next few weeks. Would it be pointless to try to do tutoring sessions if that is the case?
No, that could work pretty well. Usually you need to schedule your tutoring time several days in advance, but apart from that, the tutors don't care. I think it
might help to speak as regularly as you can, but you could mix up tutoring sessions with other speaking and writing opportunities.