Cavesa wrote:But you seem to be missing my point. Writing is an integral part of language learning, it is in every exam, it is needed for jobs and normal life. A tutor not willing to really focus on it, that's like a doctor not wanting to treat a boring illness within his specialty.
Like I said I've had no problem finding Italian teachers who are willing to work with me on writing so I'm not sure why you do. I've just been too lazy to take them up on it. If a doctor doesn't want to treat a boring illness she can omit it from her specialty and refer to someone else.
It is all about the expectations. If I wanted to just pay for chatting, I would find many tutors fitting the bill. But that's simply not worth paying for imho. Perhaps you have lower expectations, and I don't mean it in any offensive way. But as Italki tutors start around 10 euros (many cost much more), which is double the hourly payment of a doctor in half Europe
But, I'm not paying only for chatting. I'm paying for feedback on my chatting by having my errors pointed out. Once in a while I even focus on some particular verb conjugation or other grammar point but not usually since that's not my primary focus. We also tend to speak on only one or two subjects so I frequently end up adding new vocabulary in a more natural way. For me it's cheap though it's closer to $20/17€ these days. Spending many hours trying to finding good rapport via language exchanges where I have to spend half my time with English isn't worth my time.
And yes, they are mostly failures. Of have you met a single person with high IQ, who would choose a teaching degree? It's mostly for people, who don't get accepted to something more prestigious but just want any degree. And many even admit being faiulures. Many of the expat tutors even admit that they failed at a different career, so they took the CELTA or something like that to get an expat life. So no, it is no offense, just the reality.
We'll have to agree to disagree as my experiences are different. I've found the majority of tutors to be quite satisfactory and I don't know how you could possibly know their IQ. I don't assign prestige to jobs and unless something has changed in the US education system IQ testing isn't a common thing here. But yes I know several reasonably intelligent people who chose teaching as their career path because they were passionate about education.
I see a lot of potential in tools like Speechling and hope to see more of them in the future, perhaps even in the area of writing. If you take the main initiative and decision making away from the tutor, and pick only those good at a particular task, it works really well. That's the future.
I agree that Speechling is an excellent resource. On a practical level I don't know how you could extrapolate it into writing very easily. But if someone takes it on as a project that would be fantastic.
In the US we have remedial courses available in reading, writing and math at some community colleges for those who aren't quite ready for university level courses for whatever reason (high school dropout, grew up in a poorly performing school district, non-native English speaker, older returning student needing a refresher, etc). It seems like a remedial writing course could be beneficial to a language learner but I don't even know if this is available in other countries.