Chapters
- 01. How To Generally Organise Your English Tutoring Lessons
- 02. Planning Lessons For Primary Level Learners (Grade 1- 6: Lower & Middle Basic Education)
- 03. Organising Lessons For Grade 7-9 (Upper Basic Education) and Senior Secondary Level Learners
- 04. Planning English Lessons For SSCE (WAEC, NECO) and JAMB Candidates
When you begin your career as an English tutor in Nigeria, you'll realise that tutoring jobs vary greatly and depend on the classes you teach. The teaching qualifications required to teach primary school students is completely different from the teaching experience and qualifications needed to teach secondary school students.
If your dream is to tutor university students, you'd have to not only gain teaching experience, but you'd also need specific certifications that will make you eligible to teach English at this level. The same rule applies to external and international examinations like GMAT, TEFL, etc.
In essence, knowledge varies for students. And because education varies for different student levels, provisions are made for separate teaching syllabuses and teaching strategies. You must always bear in mind the level of the student before offering a specific tutoring strategy. For example, you cannot teach a primary school student the same way you teach a university undergraduate or a secondary school student.
Each of your English lessons should focus on a particular topic and involve activities that can improve the student's learning experience and make their classes interesting.
As a prerequisite to starting English education lessons, time and activities are an important factor. So, the English teacher must be able to know how to make the most out of their time and provide activities that can boost the student's learning experience.
To boost a teacher's tutoring profile, a good tutor must learn to utilize the time they have and make sure that students grasp the ideas embedded in the classes before moving on to the next topic.
Find out how to become an English teacher in Nigeria
How To Generally Organise Your English Tutoring Lessons
Before diversifying into the ways to organise training sessions for different levels, let's discuss the basic way teachers can help students learn irrespective of their education level.
Having an understanding of basic tutoring principles can make your English education experience worthwhile for students
Whether you're a private teacher looking for online English teaching jobs, or you're currently providing your tutoring experience at a school or a tutoring centre, making use of these tips can help improve your tutoring skills and boost your overall profile.
Learn all about English tutoring jobs
Work With Reviews
It doesn't matter whether your lessons are online, physical or you're taking other subjects; start your class with a warm greeting. After which you do a review of last week's training. In your class, ask the students what they learned from the last session. The tutor can also ask the learner to cite examples from the previously taught sessions.
This time allows for interactive conversations and boosts the learning skills of the student. Also, restating what has been learned allows teachers to get a better idea of where to start their lessons for that day.
If a tutor continues to apply this method, not only would their teaching create a unique experience for the learners, but it will also further improve their tutoring career.
Start With An Introduction
The thought of taking compulsory subjects like Maths and English already scares many learners. Since subjects like this can be broad, tutors must always start with an introduction. For many tutors, it's not always easy to start an introduction. In fact, it's one of the skills that you'll have to consciously sharpen.
Starting English classes with an introduction provides time for the pupils to ease into the class sessions which can help them understand what is being taught.
Your introduction can start by explaining what your pupils will learn in the lesson. You can jot down the topics on the board. For instance, if you're giving a lesson on nouns and pronouns, explain what nouns and pronouns are.
Then apply these explanations by using them in sentences as examples.
Search For Suitable Activities
In your search for activities, ensure that you're looking for the ones that will suit the class you're training. For many tutors, activities help them achieve their mission faster; which is to help learners boost their retentive memories. As an English tutor, make sure that the activities you search for are designed in a way that your pupils can use the new information you have taught them properly.
If you tutor them on adverbs and adjectives, follow up with classwork or exercises that can help them apply the knowledge they just acquired from you.
If you're teaching literature topics to primary class learners, you can encourage them to learn better by getting them to act out plays, stories or poems.
Plant a Good Ending
Whether you're a maths teacher or an English tutor, how you end your lesson hours is important. We stated earlier that good tutors would pay attention to timing, just to avoid abrupt endings when their session hours are over.
To end your sessions properly, do a recap of all that you have taught for the day.
Summarizing your lesson hours in a few minutes is a great need for your pupils. It allows them to retain the information firmly and better.
Ask them what they have learned and if they can apply it to their classwork or homework. Having to tutor this way also helps improve the career profile of the teacher.
Learn how to train dyslexic learners
Planning Lessons For Primary Level Learners (Grade 1- 6: Lower & Middle Basic Education)
In primary school, the age range you'll tutor is between 5 - 11 years. At this level, tutors are focused on improving their pupils' reading abilities. The job of the tutor is to offer lessons that focus on making sure pupils can pronounce and unite unknown words accurately and seamlessly through their knowledge of phonemes.
At this stage, a tutor's lesson plan should include:
- Grapheme-phoneme correspondences and revision of past lessons.
- Helping pupils read and develop their abilities to produce word sounds without being shy or reluctant.
- Helping them to fluently read words containing -es, s, -er, -est and -ing endings.
- Teaching them the ability to add prefixes and suffixes along with applying the rules of grammar, spelling and word pronunciation.
- Train children on handwriting abilities, which also includes training them on how to sit properly on their desks, how to hold pencils the right way, etc.
Find out salary rates and how you can set yours as an English instructor
Organising Lessons For Grade 7-9 (Upper Basic Education) and Senior Secondary Level Learners
The age range for learners at this stage is 12 - 16. An English tutor's lessons should be organised in such a way that they develop an interest in reading, communicating and expressing. It involves encouraging them to search for and read new, challenging texts. You should also introduce them to fiction and non-fiction texts that can help boost their cognitive abilities.
The tutor should also train them on the correct use of grammar, sentence structure, use of vocabulary, etc. This is the stage where their writing abilities is expected to get better, and they should be able to write, edit, and proof-read.
Depending on the level, teachers can focus their topics on active and passive voice, adverbs, synonyms and antonyms, auxiliary verbs, nouns, prepositions, etc.
Planning English Lessons For SSCE (WAEC, NECO) and JAMB Candidates
Whether you intend to teach English online or at home, taking English courses at this level requires a bit more specialization. Usually, learners at this level are the age range between 17 - 19.
Your lessons should involve helping your learners understand English tenses, grammatical functions and how to analyse literary texts. Learners at this stage should be taught to understand the English language and utilize it for persuasion and providing information. Your lessons should also help them develop the ability to respond to different text styles and a strong foundation of linguistics.
Short quizzes, tests, interactive sessions should be done frequently. You should also include oral tests and quizzes designed to train them on how to analyze fiction and non-fiction. The tutor's session hours should as well assist them in becoming proficient in grammar spelling, punctuation, writing and reading abilities, etc.
These quizzes are to assist teachers to monitor the progress of their pupils and ensure that they progress smoothly into advanced stages.
If you're interested in private tutoring, consider creating a work profile with Superprof. Superprof is an international tutoring platform that expanded to Nigeria and offers quality training through approved teachers to a wide variety of local learners.
The Superprof platform allows you to meet with learners all across Nigeria, and as a Superprof instructor, you have high chances of being hired for your services. Superprof has also made it easier for learners to give reviews on your portfolio, and as you expand your teaching methods, get more students, you can choose to review your teaching rates.
The platform that connects tutors and students
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