How Much to Charge for Private English Lessons in Taipei?

I agree with your points but this one I don’t just place as a failure on the backs of whitey in a cram school with no skills. They would actually learn a thing or two no matter how poor the teacher is, but there is no classroom control these days and whitey is expected to be a class clown so no real instruction is done. Problem kids can’t be kicked out either as laoban wants the money even if the entire class gets disrupted.

If you tried to get serious the kids would complain teacher is boring. And when a cram school offers $600 hr max, nobody is going to go out of their way to care much.

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From her Line photo, she’s pretty smoking hot and from the few messages we’ve exchanged, funny to boot.

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I got lucky with a job like this long ago. I forget the pay. Three young kids. Basically babysitting and playing in English. But they were fantastic kids and I had so much fun with them. I remember I asked a coworker to sub for me when I went on vacation, and he had the same reaction: “I wasn’t looking forward to that at all, but those kids are great!”

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You sure a language tutor is all she’s looking for?

If you have a potential client lined up, that answers a lot of our questions. Does she have any specific learning goals? For English fluency you don’t really have to prepare. For going up 2 bands on IELTS writing, that’s a lot of work for you which is easier if you are qualified.

I wouldn’t need to be paid much to make a 15 minute trip to hang out with a hot and funny girl, and maybe correct some errors in her speaking

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Thank you all for your responses, it’s helped me understand the tutoring market here a lot more.

To give some context: I actually live in Taoyuan and will have to take a train to Taipei Main Station to have our not-so-serious-supposed-to-be-fun English lesson and I would totally not do it except that something really feels right about meeting her. She’s the cousin of one of my co-teachers who set this up for us. We’ll see where it goes!

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Maybe approach it like a first date and negotiation (if you are single, the language training part might be a cover, right?)?

The first meeting is discovery. Go there, see how the trip is, see how the chemistry is, find out what her learning needs and wants are. Then you can decide how much preparation you will need, how much actual teaching you will do (or will it become a lot of dating), and how much it is worth it to you.

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Sounds like a date.

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I actually have no idea but my “Taiwanese Mama” (old woman in my office that I talk about life with every day) thinks it might be about something more than just English practice.

No specific learning goals other than improving her speaking ability and she has emphatically denounced the idea of using a book.

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This seems right. Thank you TT!

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I’m shaking my head and rolling my eyes. You don’t get anywhere in learning anything if you don’t have some sort of goal in mind. It’s also impossible as a teacher to find proper materials when the only goal is “improve my speaking ability”. What elements of speaking? Are they giving speeches? Having conversations? If conversations, what about? How will you learn the language needed for that conversation if you don’t first hear or read a text that introduces the topic? I can understand not wanting to use a textbook, as most teachers jump right past the (usually worthless) text at the front to focus on grammar and vocabulary, but “I just want to get better at speaking and i don’t want a book” is setting the entire process up to fail.

That’s up to the student who’s hiring the teacher, isn’t it? I used to try to prep more for tutoring. Vanishingly few adult students wanted it. They just wanted to talk for 60-90 minutes. The only consistent use I found for a book or more organized material is a veiled threat to pull it out if they weren’t saying much. If that’s what they want, sure, easier for me I suppose. They were hiring me to talk & listen to them, not to lecture them about the best way for them to improve their skills.

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Don’t listen to this @ryznfree

She has a goal, you can meet and ask about specifics. Just speaking with what she already knows will improve fluency, you do not need a book or anything for this. Meet her first, then come back when you know what she wants/needs and we can advise if you’re interested.

Maybe her goal, her wants/needs, aren’t something you can satisfy with “materials”

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I guess that depends on what you’re trying to accomplish as a teacher too. Back when parents tried to offer me NT$170/hour (dear god!) and I actually did take on students for NT$600/hr, I saw that as “conversation class” only. I’m not going to put in an effort if you’re not going to pay me for the effort. But at the rate I charge now, I expect my students to put in some effort and consider what they want to learn. That does mean I have to guide them to think about what it means to “learn” a language. It’s where the ACTFL “can do” statements come into play. They need to think about what they can do now and think about where they want to be. I don’t see it as a good use of my time to just have conversations with people. It’s also a waste of their money and my expertise.

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Do your books elicit conversation, though? Most of my students are sick of books and only want conversation since it’s the only area they don’t spend much time in.

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I don’t explicitly stick to any one book. I have a number of EFL textbooks from the US and the UK that are content-based and genuinely interesting. They all have accompanying audio that is high quality and has natural sounding speech. I also have a subscription to Reading A-Z, which has leveled readers in literally every possible subject for virtually every reading level (that a Taiwanese person is going to have; it goes up through US elementary fifth grade or so, but even adults who did grad school in the US can’t understand the highest level readers when they start working with me). This is why the students goals are important — I pick out materials for them to listen to and read on their own so that we can use what they learned in our lessons. The text is just a jumping off point for discussion. If there’s something from the text they don’t grasp, and there often is, we use mind maps and other methods used in an ELA classroom to facilitate better understanding and use of the language.

To be clear, none of the textbooks I use have dialogues, so we don’t do those. Even the level 1 textbooks for elementary students are short texts about a topic. But the images on the page along with the short text they did read are plenty to facilitate an hour of conversation or story-asking (depending on how much of the language the students knows)

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Can anyone on here recommend some good websites for finding one-to-one students? I’m also trying to do more English tutoring but finding it difficult to know which sites Taiwanese use to find tutors.

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Yea until your student has a limited budget and is trying to play on your desperation of getting jobs, and gets you to agree to 500 an hour or less. Happened to me a few times, and no guidebooks or anything to follow too, have to make shit up on the fly. And the kid doesn’t want to be there until the parent decides to apply corrective action causing the kid to bawl his heart out.

It’s all an act. I don’t know what the intent is, what is the parent hoping to get out of it?

I have a side job like this too and I love it. I get to play with Legos and sing nursery rhymes in Spanish for a couple of hours, AND I get paid for that. The kids are really cute, and it makes me so happy to see their progress. Also, the parents are incredibly nice and interesting to talk to.

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As the years pass I get increasingly incredulous over how great that experience was, and I’m grateful this thread has reminded me of them. I don’t have kids of my own, and of course my own nieces and nephews are wonderful, but so far as just pure simple fun I’ve had with kids, that trio may be the top.

I have zero idea where they are now. Hope they’re doing well in the adult life they’re well into.

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Your story is so heart-warming. Thank you for sharing it with us!

Interestingly, I’m usually not very fond of children. :joy: But these are two very sweet, creative, and smart girls, so I enjoy playing with them.

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