Online French tutoring for secondary school

Nearly everything a secondary pupil writes in French now gets typed. Homework, essays, an application, a message to the teacher. And something happens on a keyboard that does not happen by hand: the accents fall off. The same pupil who puts every mark in place in an exercise book will type the bare letter on an unconfigured keyboard, because each accent costs three keystrokes instead of one. After a fortnight it is a habit, and French without accents is not untidy French, it is a different word in places. This is one of the few things only a shared screen catches. The tutor watches the text as it appears, at the moment the hand chooses between the bare letter and the right one, and can stop you there rather than a week later over a corrected draft. The repair is mechanical and you do it once: set a French keyboard layout or the accent shortcuts, test it on a single paragraph, and from then on hold the arrangement in the simplest way, by no longer accepting a draft without accents. It is fair to say when this is not for you. If the written French paper is handwritten for your cohort, and that is worth checking for your own school, then typing is not the thing to buy and the room is the better choice. The same applies if the pupil barely writes at all: then the first question is quantity, not equipment. When you write to a tutor, ask whether the pupil will type during the lesson in a shared document or send finished work in advance. Those are not the same arrangement, and only the first catches the error while it forms. The first lesson is free, so have the pupil type five sentences in front of the tutor and get the keyboard sorted out on the spot.