Ideal Length of ESL Lessons

I teach private ESL students one-to-one. I offer my students the option of one-hour, one-and-a-half hour, and two-hour lessons. I've found that the optimum time for a private ESL lesson is one-and-a-half hours. I highly recommend to all of my potential students that they take the one-and-a-half hour option and I give a significant price break for this option. Most of my students take this option and it works very well. They often remark on how quickly the time went by.

The reason that I prefer one-and-a-half hour lessons is that one hour ESL lessons are too short and two hour lessons are too long. I believe that my students and I are able to accomplish the greatest amount of learning in this time period, without either of us becoming too exhausted.

Most of my students are working adults who I meet after their long work days. Two-hour ESL lessons are just sometimes too much extra work for the day.

I have had some students who travel very far and for this reason they prefer the longer two-hour lesson time period.

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Length of Private ESL Lessons

I offer three options to my ESL students for the length of our individual lessons: one hour, one-and-half hours, and two hours. In my ads to find new students and when meeting with my students for the first time, I highly recommend that they take the one-and-a-half hour option. Ninety per cent of my students have heeded this recommendation.

Most of my ESL students are either working professionals or visiting scholars (as well as parents), so their time is limited. Additionally, the learners that I meet in the evenings are often, as you can imagine, tired from their workday. A two-hour lesson is just way too much. I feel that the last half hour is really a waste of their time and money, as it is difficult for students to continue to focus for such a long period of time. About half of my students travel a long way to meet with me. Some of them prefer to meet me for two hours.

One-hour lessons are just not enough (usually), in my opinion. It is often very difficult to cover enough material to make sure that the English student can sufficiently learn and show some mastery of the topic. Of course, for students who only want to improve their English conversation skills through conversation practice, a one-hour lesson is often sufficient. I have had students successfully improve their English skills when only meeting once a week for only one hour, but these students have been willing and able to dedicate a significant amount of time studying outside of class.

One-and-a-half hour-lessons seem to work the best for both my students and for me. We can sufficiently cover the topic and have enough time to practice and reinforce the topic, especially some English grammar topics.

To encourage potential students to choose one-and-a-half hour lessons, I offer a discount.

As for how long we continue to have lessons, this is usually determined by the length of time the student is in the country, or for those who live here (in the U.S.) how their work schedule pans out. Some students have specific goals they want to meet. We stop working together when the student meets his or her goals.

Present Perfect Exercise Glitch

Today, I met with a beginning level ESL student. Her homework for the weekend included a cloze exercise (a "filling in the blanks" exercise) using the Present Perfect. Before we started correcting the exercise, she asked me if all the blanks were supposed to be filled in using the Present Perfect. I said, "yes." When we started going over the answers, I realized that the exercises actually required using either the Present Perfect or the the Simple Past. Oops.

I apologized profusely to the student for giving her the wrong instructions. However, we were able to make the corrections together and this turned out to be another learning opportunity. I was also able to see her thought processes in determining whether the correct verb tense was the Present Perfect or the Simple Past.

I got the ESL grammar exercise from one of the of the sites that I use regularly for exercises. (I had copied and pasted it to Microsoft Word on my laptop (giving all the appropriate credit to the website).) It said that the exercise was for the Present Perfect. Other exercises specified other tenses, so I made the assumption that the whole exercise labeled "Present Perfect" was only using the Present Perfect.

This is not the first time I discovered an error in an ESL lesson I got from the Internet. Moral of the story: review the exercise before you assign it to your student!