I’ve been teaching English for over 12 years and I’m going to help you with your first day with your new English student. This is for any teachers out there who about to start their very first class with an individual student so that you know exactly what you’re going to do because you know it’s all about those first impressions.
Do a level test
Before the class even starts contact the student by email and send them a level test. This is going to give you an idea of what level they have. Ask your student to go to https://test-english.com/ to find out their level. Take the test found here https://test-english.com/level-test/. Tell your student to send you the result. This website will provide your student with a level from A1 to C2.
If you learn the nationality of your student, then this post might help you with learning their English level.
Start the class with an informal conversation about some of the student’s personal information. I choose a set of questions that are going to give me an idea of what oral level the student has. Get the list of questions below!
If the student is able to answer all of the A1 or A2 questions with no difficulty it means I can move on to the B1 and B2 questions. I then repeat the process. I’m listening for any mistakes that they might make and when I get to a point where the student does not understand the question that is when I decide to stop. When we finish this informal conversation, I decide on their initial speaking level. Let’s say this took us about 10 minutes but there’s still 50 minutes left! What are we going to do next?!
Do a needs analysis
The next thing we’re going to do is a Needs Analysis. This helps get an idea of what the student’s objectives are. It starts with questions like;
- What is your objective with English?
Get the student to talk about what they think their strengths are in English and what are their weaknesses are. From my experience most of my students described their speaking and listening skills as their weaknesses and their reading and writing skills as their strengths.
Grab the needs analysis below!
The needs analysis document took about 20 minutes so we’re halfway through! Well done! We’ve still got a half of the class to go!
Teacher & Student Presentation
We’re going to get to know each other and the teacher is going to do one of my timeless activities that I always use. In the first class with I do a teacher presentation activity using a mind map. I write my name in the middle and I come up with let’s say, six to eight questions about myself but I don’t write the questions, I write the answers. For example;
I write the word Bath, what’s the question?
- Where are you from?
If your students of an A1 or A2 level then you might want to continue with questions in the present simple;
- What do you like?
Higher level students can answer questions like;
- Where have you travelled this year?
- What would you be doing if you weren’t in class with me right now?!
When you finish, your student is going to do exactly the same thing. Give them access to the online whiteboard you’re using, or if you’re in an in-person class and ask a student to come up to the front of the class and start writing on the board. This will also give you an insight into how able they are to form questions in English. The presentations take 10 minutes each so you’ve now used 20 minutes, so you’re nearly there! You’ve got 10 more minutes!
Lesson material
Grab both the oral level test questions and the needs analysis and get a discount.
Error correction
It’s important that up until this point, you should have been making notes of all your student’s mistakes with their grammar, vocabulary pronunciation etc and now you’re going to use these 10 minutes to go over and correct some of these problems. If your student has made a lot of mistakes then make sure you’re selective. Choose a couple of mistakes that you feel are important to correct and go through them together in the class. You’ve got to the end of the class, the 10 minutes are up!
Start planning
Now you need to think about planning. Use what topics they were interested in and plan the following classes around them. I wrote a post about how to build a course plan using Google Docs here.
If you’re not interested in using Google Docs, then check out this free digital planner right here.
I also have a post right here about the basics of teaching online to individual students. I hope the advice I’ve given you today will make teaching your first English class a success.