Dear German learner,
I absolutely understand your desire to find a tutor using English to learn German more efficiently. In using a language that you already understand well your tutor is able to explain things way more clearly to you than if she taught you solely in German. That is the most reasonable and efficient approach. Just because it is usually done otherwise doesn’t mean that it is the best method. I also share the Berlitz experience a user has mentioned. You will not easily find a school offering such services in form of groups. I have seen one a while ago, that took it lightly with using English in the classroom, but can not find it anymore. The best is to go for a private tutor which you can find for anything between 20€ and 80€ per lesson (i.e. 45mins). Find one that uses common sense and uses English as instructional language.
Here is why your request is reasonable and why you won’t find it in (many) language schools:
SMART
- You UNDERSTAND quickly and can make immediate USE of it. Like this you have more time to practice CORRECT German instead of guessing around or at the least feel uncertain about it.
- Grammar is a quite complex matter. Explaining something complex in a language that is not well understood is just unreasonable and creates frustration and uncertainty.
- If the teacher can not explain things properly as she doesn’t have the tools (English language), she has to work with many examples. Next to being a waste of time, you are the one doing all the figuring out. Why would you pay for that? Isn’t that why we hire experts to explain things clearly and faultlessly?
- The direct approach as this kind of teaching is called has not been proven scientifically i.e. measurably to be any more efficient than any other approach.
- The concept is from the sixties and has widely been misunderstood. Just because one has to listen a lot to German, that doesn’t mean that everything has to be taught! in German.
- We do not learn languages like children. We learn them also much faster. Considering that a learner learns best when she’s exposed to a language like when she was a child is jus bad didactics.
NOT IN SCHOOLS BECAUSE
- Language schools in Germany need many students to run economically. It often so happens that there are students that are not able to understand English (or any other common language) so that the teacher has to refer to a language that everybody understands to the same degree. Ironically it is the language everybody doesn’t understand to the same degree: German.
- Usually language schools have a high fluctuation of language teachers. Those have to be replaceable to run a school economically. As not all German teachers speak good English, this widens the range of available staff members for the school to chose from.
- If a school teaches the monolingual way although the group is homogenous, i.e. e.g. speaking a common language, then they haven’t done their research and still believe those behaviorists from the sixties.
These points are not just my opinion. These are the results and the conclusions of years of experience and scientific and practical research. If you claim that teaching German solely in German is more beneficial for any learner and not just the tutor / school, prove that it is or tag it as your assumption. A good entry read not only for tutors is Butzkamm.