We have previously covered the reasons why your child requires Chinese Tuition. As stated before, Chinese tuition is a swift and sure-fire way to hyper boost the Chinese standards of your child. Now that you are ready to hire one, how do you find one that’s the best fit for your child? Today, we will cover three factors for you to consider before engaging the service. These three factors are very important as they can determine the effectiveness Chinese tuition has on your child:
Budget.
First off, you must determine the amount of money you have available to spend for Chinese tuition. Typically, ex-MOE Chinese teachers and Chinese tuition agencies with an established track record would be rather costly, about upwards of 40 dollars per hour, and that is only for children in the lower primary. For upper primary students, they can go up to 50 dollars per hour! Furthermore, typical tuition sessions are about 1.5 hours long, and sometimes can extend to 2 hours. So by doing a very basic calculation, assuming the cost per hour is 40 dollars and one session of 1.5 hours is conducted every week, you would be paying 240 dollars for a month of your child’s Chinese tuition! There are definitely cheaper alternatives out there such as undergraduate and student tutors, however it is very hard to prospect the quality of their teaching as they do not have certificates and teaching credentials to back them up.
One-on-one or group?
Next, you must decide whether your child learns better in a crowded classroom or requires extra supervision from the teacher. This will depend on the learning style of your child. Is he easily distracted or super-absorbed in whatever he is doing? If he is easily distracted, chances are that he wouldn’t do so well in a fully packed classroom. If he is very focused on what he is doing, he will do fine to either have one-on-one or group tuition. Linking back to the topic of budget, one-to-one tuition classes are generally more expensive as compared to group tuition classes as it is more intensive on the tutor’s resources (time and effort on one individual as opposed to a group). Note that both options are equally valid, and it will come down to which is a better fit for your child depending on his traits.
Availability.
This refers to both availability of the tutor and your child. By default, your child will be in school from Monday to Friday, and be back in the evening. Would you want to send your child to Chinese tuition on a weekday night, after a full day of classes and perhaps even co-curricular activities? An exhausted child would not absorb much knowledge, and it may even backfire by lowering his focus during the day in school. However, if you send him to Chinese tuition classes on the weekend instead, you need to be aware that this leaves him with lesser time to recharge before school on the weekdays again. So, this is a consideration you must take into account. We would also then need to consider the availability of the tutor as well. Due to demand, tutors may only have limited slots for your child to join.
The points mentioned above form an intricate web of considerations as a barrier to planning and obtaining a Chinese tutor. Therefore, some careful groundwork must be laid out before you engage a Chinese tutor.
Luckily enough, you can reduce some of these burden by engaging us! We offer trial lessons for you to assess if your child would benefit from our teaching. Currently, we have pre-school, lower primary and upper primary Chinese tuition available.
If you have any enquiries, feel free to call us at +65 6836 9887, email us at [email protected] or contact us through our online enquiry form.