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Teach English in Caijiahui Zhen - Luliang Shi

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While group teaching still stays as the most popular lesson type, due to the increasing demand for tutoring, teacher most likely will need to perform individual lessons at some point in his career. It is important to know advantages and disadvantages of such lessons and understand their difference to prepare for both types of lessons accordingly. One of the biggest advantages of individual lessons is that a student gets full attention from a teacher. This in turn lets teacher to address mistakes and errors specific to the particular student, whereas with a group teaching there might be not enough time or such mistake might even go unnoticed. However, because of the constant monitoring student can feel more pressure, which can affect student motivation. Most of the time, however, motivation is not a concern. As individual lessons usually organized by request from a student who decided to improve his language skills, motivation to learn is high. Group lessons, on the other hand, can consist of students with different motivation levels, so teacher will need to find a way to engage in a lesson those who are less interested in learning. Individual lessons also let teacher build a good rapport with his students and generally have more relaxed and informal atmosphere. This allows discussion of more personal topics such as student interests, hobbies, life goals and more. As a result, teacher can tailor lesson activities using provided information to make lessons more interesting. Overall atmosphere of an individual lesson also allows student to be less reluctant to ask questions regarding material or task. Because student has all of the teachers time such questions can even be asked in succession, which is less likely in a group lesson where teachers’ time is divided between the students. This is especially relevant for more shy students, as they might feel too intimidated in a group lesson. However, depending on the size of the group, teacher can achieve similar results with group lessons as well. Another advantage is increased flexibility of individual lessons. Thanks to the fact that teacher needs to ensure that only single student understands the material, parts of the lesson can be added or cut depending on learning pace of the student. If student has no trouble with presented material, teacher can put more focus on activities, or, in case student has troubles with one of the tasks, teacher can spend more time explaining topic and providing examples. Because of this, it is better to prepare additional materials when working with individual students. More often than not individual lessons are organized to achieve specific goals. For example to improve grammar, to achieve certain fluency level, to expand vocabulary and others. This allows teacher to plan lesson with these predetermined goals in mind. Downside of this is that, depending on a goal of the student, it might be hard to find relevant materials or course books, so planning of a lesson can take more time than usual. With group lessons, course program most likely will be decided by a company that organizes these lessons and have more general goal. One of the main disadvantages of the individual lesson is a restriction of possible activities. Logically, teacher will not be able to use some of the group activities such as surveys, while other activities will need to be adapted for one-on-one lesson. This is where constant presence of a teacher can be viewed as a disadvantage. As the main goal of the ‘activate’ phase of the lesson is to allow students to experiment with the language, teacher typically will try to remove himself from a lesson assuming supportive role. But because there are only two participants in the individual lesson, teacher often will also participate in activities (such as taking one of the roles in a role-play scenario or joining discussion). As a result, student can simply refer to a teacher in case he does not understand a word instead of a dictionary or can ask for feedback on the task directly from the teacher instead of other students. These trouble scenarios that arise during group activities allow students to develop key language skills and they are best acquired in a standard group lesson rather than individual one. Another downside to consider is a student fatigue. It is quite possible that an individual lesson with a student will be scheduled after his work or school so naturally student can be exhausted, which in turn can affect his learning ability. This is also can be applied to a group lessons as well, as it is quite possible that person goes to a group classes as an addition to his main classes or work for self-improvement or other reason. In conclusion, we can say that both individual and group lessons come with their own strengths and weaknesses and share both to a certain degree. A good teacher should adequately prepare for both types of a lesson and try to negate disadvantages of each while making full use of the possible advantages.


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