Dr Suzanne Kobeisse
I want to be careful here, because this is not a piece about dismissing schools or blaming teachers. The teachers I know are working hard within real constraints: large classes, prescribed curricula, exam-board requirements, not enough hours in the week. The textbook they use was designed for that environment. My point is simply that the environment itself creates certain outcomes, and private tuition allows for a completely different set of outcomes. Understanding the difference is worth your time.
Let me start with a moment that stays with me. A student came to me at the age of nineteen, two years after finishing his A Level French with a good grade. He had studied French for seven years. He could not hold a conversation in a French café without freezing. He knew the word for "railway station" (la gare) and the word for "sustainable development" (le développement durable) but he could not confidently order a coffee or ask for directions to the nearest one. Seven years. A good grade. No French.
That gap between the grade and the ability is not an accident. It is the predictable product of a particular kind of teaching.
What textbook teaching produces
School French, in most UK settings, is built around topic areas and written assessment. Students learn the vocabulary for les transports (transport) this term, and l'environnement (the environment) next term. They practise writing paragraphs using those words, they learn to structure a response for the mark scheme, they sit a paper. Then the topic changes.
The grammar is usually introduced in isolation: here is the present tense, here is how it conjugates, here are some exercises. The connection between grammar and communication is rarely made explicit. Students learn that je mange means "I eat" but not when a native speaker would say je suis en train de manger instead (I am eating, right now, in this moment). They learn the rule without the feel of the rule.
Speaking practice, in large classes, is minimal. Thirty students, one teacher, fifty minutes: the mathematics are against genuine conversation. Role plays are rehearsed rather than spontaneous. Students learn the shape of French communication without the substance.
None of this is a scandal. It is what the system requires and what the system can deliver. My job, in private tuition, is to do something the system cannot.
What I do instead
The first thing I do with any new student, before we touch grammar or vocabulary, is talk. In French, as much as their level allows, and in English where it does not. I want to know what they are curious about, what they have tried before, what has frustrated them, what small moments of success they remember. A student who once managed to ask for directions in Paris and was understood: that memory matters. We build from it.
Conversation comes first in my lessons, always. This is not a method I invented; it is how children learn languages. They hear language, they attempt language, they are corrected gently and immediately, they try again. The grammar follows from the communication rather than preceding it. A student who says j'ai allé instead of je suis allé (a classic error with verbs of movement) learns why the correction matters not because I recite the rule about être verbs, but because we are in the middle of telling a story and the correction is immediate and contextualised. It sticks.
I also weave culture into every lesson, because language without culture is a skeleton without muscle. When we talk about la politesse (politeness), we do not just learn vocabulary. We talk about why bonjour said to a shopkeeper matters in France, why forgetting it is genuinely noticed, what it signals about the relationship between a customer and a merchant. That cultural context makes the word memorable in a way that a vocabulary list cannot.
Pace and personalisation
The second thing that changes in one-to-one tuition is pace. In a class of thirty, the teacher must find the middle of the group and aim there. Students who are ahead get bored; students who are behind get lost. In my lessons, I work entirely at the pace of the person in front of me.
Some students want intensive progress over a short period: they have a trip coming up, or a meeting with French colleagues, or they are returning to a qualification after years away and need to rebuild quickly. Others want a gentle, sustainable pace across months or years, fitting French around full-time work or family life. I have students who come for one session a week and are content with that. I have students who come twice a week and push hard. The lesson adjusts to the life, not the other way around.
This personalisation extends to content. I am not bound to a topic list. If a student is passionate about French cinema, we use that. If they travel to Brittany every summer and want to understand the menu at the crêperie, we start there. If they are reading a French novel and are stuck on the subjonctif, we address the subjunctive in the context of the sentences they are actually reading. Motivation and content are inseparable from progress.
What I do when a student has an exam to pass
I should be clear: I can and do prepare students for GCSEs and A Levels. The approach I have described is not incompatible with exam success. It is, in my experience, more compatible with it. A student who can speak freely and read with understanding will find the written exam less frightening than one who has only ever practised the exam format.
What I add to exam preparation is the ability to think in French rather than translate from English. That speed of processing is what separates a student who finds the listening component manageable from one who falls behind every track. It develops through conversation, through exposure, through being expected to respond in real time. It does not develop through filling in blanks.
The textbook has its place. I use graded readers, structured vocabulary lists, grammar references. I am not against printed resources. What I am against is the idea that the textbook is the lesson, rather than one tool among many. French is a living language. It deserves to be taught by someone who has lived in it.
"The quickest way to feel French flowing is to speak it, badly, from the first lesson. I would rather you say something wrong today than something perfect tomorrow."
That is genuinely what I believe. Come and speak some imperfect French with me. We will get somewhere together.