Are You Checking With Students About These Preferences?

Every student has different preferences for their lessons, and being aware of them will help your classes run more smoothly.

Today we'll go over two main types of preferences students have and show you how to check with them about these during your lessons.

1. Lesson Flow

The lesson flow is the structure of the lesson from start to finish. Most of the time, this means doing self-introductions for a couple of minutes and then going through lesson materials exercise by exercise for the rest of the lesson.

However, not all students want their lessons to go like this. For example:

• Many advanced students request to skip self-introductions, because they've done them so many times and don’t want to keep talking about easy topics like their hobbies. 
• Some students choose Daily News lessons but skip the vocabulary and reading exercises so they can use lesson time to practice speaking.

So it's important to make sure you're on the same page before jumping into any lesson material. Let's look at some easy ways to check in with your students about their preferences.

At the start of the lesson

At the start of the lesson, you will usually check with your student about their lesson requests, which can be seen when you click into their booking.

After you've done this, ask them about their preferred lesson flow. Here are some ways to do this.

Asking the student if there's anything they want to focus on helps them feel in control of the lesson and that you care about their needs.

Your student will either respond “Yes” or tell you how they would like to go about the class: e.g. “I would like to do exercise one by myself and then read after you in exercise two.”

During the lesson

During the lesson, it's better to keep questions to a minimum so that students can focus on the lesson material itself.

However, there are some things you'll need to ask about. For example, in our vocabulary exercises, some vocabulary words have more than one example sentence. In this case, you can ask if the student wants to read and repeat all of them or just the first one.

Another good time to check in with students is when you notice them struggling.

• If your student struggles with a fill-in-the-blanks exercise, you might ask if they want to repeat it for extra practice.
• When you're teaching complicated topics like grammar, you'll want to check if you're going too quickly or if they need you to explain something again - especially if they seem confused.

2. Corrections

Each student has different preferences for how and when they want to be corrected.

• Some students want to be corrected at any time and may ask you to correct all of their errors.
• Some students don't want any corrections and may even feel humiliated by them.
• Some students want to be corrected, but only at certain times, such as the end of an exercise, a lesson, or a discussion.

So while you may have ideas about the best times and ways to make corrections, it's important to put students' preferences first.

Most people don't correct learners out of politeness. So when I was learning languages, I was very happy to be corrected. But as a tutor, I learned that not everyone feels this way. Some students just want to express themselves in English with someone who's willing to listen.

Anonymous | Engoo Tutor from the US

Unsolicited corrections won't get through to the student and will only create more work for yourself. On the other hand, correcting students on their terms will help them stay motivated – and also make them more likely to book lessons with you in the future!

So let's take a look at how we can easily learn students' preferences for receiving corrections.

At the start of the lesson

Before a lesson has even begun, a student's lesson requests will show you whether or not they want corrections. At the start of the lesson, it's good practice to check again with the student about this.

If they confirm that they want corrections, ask them when and how they want their corrections to be given. Here's some ways you can do that.

If your student isn't sure what type of corrections they want, you can suggest focusing on pronunciation and vocabulary mistakes. These are more likely to cause communication problems than grammar mistakes.

During the lesson

Again, it's best to keep questions to a minimum when you're working on the lesson material together. However, here are some moments when it's helpful to check in with the student:

• Before reading exercises, you can ask your student if they want to be corrected the moment they mispronounce something or if they want you to leave corrections for the end of the exercise.
• Before discussion exercises, you can check if the student wants you to correct specific mistakes (like grammar or pronunciation) or if they just want you to focus on more "big picture" things (like how they could improve their response overall).

👋 That’s it for now

We hope this post has given you a better idea of the different preferences that students have for their lessons. Remember, the more you know about a student's preferences, the more smoothly the lesson will go. Happy tutoring!