Re-Thinking Teachers’ Roles for One-to-One Teaching

Abstract

While teacher training generally focuses on preparing trainees for teaching groups of students, during their careers teachers will face situations where they need to teach students in one-to-one situations. Private language teaching is a large, but often informal industry; therefore, its scale tends to be underestimated. The lack of research and teacher training in this field leads to clients (or learners) being misled easily by untrained tutors or people claiming to be professionals without any training in teaching. This review of the literature focuses on this vast, but largely abandoned area of language teaching to create a framework for the discussion of one-to-one teaching by clarifying the terminology with a focus on interpreting teachers’ roles in one-to-one teaching based on the most popular English teacher training books in the Hungarian context. The implications of this review are relevant for any stakeholder involved in language teaching and learning. Within our theoretical framework, we have defined three main roles in three professional areas: instructors are course managers (course management), teachers (professional competencies), and supporters (social-psychological awareness and skills), being primarily responsible for course design, facilitating learning, and creating a supportive atmosphere, respectively. One-to-one teaching is unique and deserves not to be on the periphery of teacher training.