ESL

What does School is Easy Tutoring do to help ESL and ELL students in Vancouver?

Our tutoring agency provides professional English as a Second Language tutoring services in the Lower Mainland. Whether you’re in Richmond, Burnaby, Surrey, Vancouver, Coquitlam, or any other Greater Vancouver community, we can help!

We send certified, Vancouver ESL tutors to the location of your choice. Whether it’s your house, the library, or any other study space, we’ll meet with you and give ESL help. Regardless of whether it’s English comprehension, vocabulary or conversational skills, we will identify the problems students are having. Then we develop a personalized lesson plan to tackle each issue. We also help students prepare for the TOEFL exam, IELTS exam, TOEIC exam and the LPI exam.

How our Vancouver ESL tutors make English accessible

We pick only the best tutors to teach English. We start by putting candidates through an intensive screening processes. For example, we do criminal background checks on potential tutors and make sure they are qualified with a TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) certificate or an equivalent. We check their credentials and we contact their teaching references.

Our ESL tutors know it is hard to come to the Greater Vancouver area from a different culture and learn a new language. Our tutoring agency understands the obstacles facing immigrant or homestay students. This understanding allows our ESL tutors to develop personalized plans for each child.

Our private ESL tutors can easily assess the areas of weakness. Then they adapt their teaching style to tackle the issues.

We have 3 types of ESL teachers.

1. We have certified public school ESL teachers who are current members of the BC teachers Regulation Branch. These teachers have a big advantage when it comes to tutoring school aged ESL students. They also teach regular classes and they are well aware of what is required to get students to an English skill level to get them out of ESL classes and into regular classes.
2. We have ESL certified teachers. These tutors are best suited to people who want to improve their English language. Students can do whole language learning that covers all of the language skills. Students can also concentrate on individual skills such as: speaking, listening, reading, writing, accent reduction, idioms or slang terms. Our ESL tutors must have a 4 year University degree and TESL certification (300 hour TESL course).
3. Native English speakers who completed English 12 with 80% or more. These tutors are best for structured conversation. They are fun and engaging and discuss a wide variety of topics. They’ll get ELL students talking!

Is the student intimidated by speaking English in social settings? We can address that!

Is the student struggling with writing English? We can fix that too!

Our in-house ESL tutors utilize a step-by-step approach that is tailored specifically for non-native English speakers. We use a variety of tools to help them succeed. Here are some examples of methods we might use.

1. Props-based learning — Here we get students to describe objects such as photographs. This is an excellent way to practice the 12 English verb tenses such as the past, present, future, continuous and all of the perfect tenses. Our tutors will also do role playing with fake money, fake food etc. to bring the lessons alive and make them more realistic. Our ESL tutors can also take videos of students role playing so students can critique themselves and notice in what areas they need improvement.
2. Subject-specific learning — This involves teaching students vocabulary and concepts specific to each subject. For example, if they are taking economics, our tutors will concentrate on explaining terms such as ‘profits’ and ‘revenue’ that are specific to business management. Then they will show how these terms fit into the English language in everyday situations.
3. Social interaction simulations — This is showing students conventions that will help them succeed in everyday English conversations.

Something that we have noticed in the ESL teaching business is that parents are more than willing to invest in English language learning for their children, but they don’t invest in themselves. As a result, the parents have poor English skills and they depend on their children to interpret and translate. This is a shame! ESL parents could truly improve their life in Canada by learning the language. An ESL tutor can go to one student’s home and meet with a group of ESL parents from the neighborhood. The tutor can build a plan to teach the parents the necessary language for useful life skills such as going to the bank, shopping at the supermarket, getting a haircut, visiting the doctor/dentist etc…

What’s the point of hiring an English as a Second Language tutor in Vancouver? Students already learn English in school!

An ESL tutor knows how to make other subjects in school accessible to people who are struggling with English. So let’s say we want to teach an ESL student math. A tutor with a TESL certification knows how to explain the subject in a way that makes sense to non-native English speakers. Here’s an example of how we might make a difficult math lesson accessible to a student.

1. They pre-teach the vocabulary needed for each math lesson.
2. They evaluate the students’ understanding of each concept.
3. Tutors use skills to gather constant feedback. One example is asking students to re-explain (not memorize!) concepts to ensure they understand the lesson
4. Where necessary, tutors can utilize mixed-ability grouping. This means getting students who have varying English speaking abilities to talk to each other. A lively ESL tutor can assist with social interaction. This is a very powerful way to help people learn a language.
5. ESL tutors will always review previous lessons and make sure all grammar rules and English vocabulary are completely understood before moving on to the next skill. The ESL tutor will continue to review the past language over and over again.

As you can see, this is a much different approach to teaching English in a non-ESL environment! ESL teachers use strategies tailored to help newer Canadians, which gives them greater success rates with non-native speakers.