French tutoring for secondary school

At secondary level French is nearly always the second foreign language, which means fewer slots on the timetable than the syllabus assumes. The material keeps moving each year, the number of lessons does not grow, and somewhere in the third year a gap opens that nobody announces: the pupil understands the text in front of them, recognises the tenses when they see them, and then has to produce a page of their own and stops after three sentences. This is not laziness. Understanding accumulates on its own, out of reading and listening. Writing and speaking need exactly the thing the timetable has run out of, which is time with somebody watching you build a sentence. So a lesson in the room is not there to explain the material again. It is there so that somebody stops you while you are writing, at the point the construction went wrong, before you finish the sentence. Corrected after the fact, you fix an answer. Caught as it forms, you change a habit. It is fair to say when you do not need this. If the plan is to sit French out until the leaving exams and never return to it, the mark is defended more cheaply and more simply, mostly by steady revision before each written test. If French is staying in the plan after school, though, this is the year that decides whether it remains a language you read or becomes one you write. When you choose a tutor, ask how much of the hour the pupil spends writing and speaking, and how much listening. The answer tells you whether they work on what school has run out of or repeat what there is already enough of. The first lesson is free, so spend it having your child write a short piece in front of the tutor rather than listening to a plan of work.