I just had the most difficult lesson of my 5 years teaching on italki.
The student was Chinese and spoke basically no English. My Chinese is maybe A2 level, and he saw that on my profile and assumed I could teach fully in Chinese. Before the lesson, I explained that I couldn’t teach in Chinese and even gave him the chance to cancel with no problem at all, but he still wanted to try using very slow/simple English.
In 30 minutes, he initially wanted:
-the difference between two verbs
-pronunciation correction for 5 words
-a lesson plan
He was also a complete beginner.
I tried my best to adapt. I made the simplest sentences possible for the verbs he asked about and even added Chinese translations to help him understand. But during the lesson he wrote in the chat that my example sentences were “difficult.”
Then later in the lesson, he suddenly asked me to teach phonetic symbols and pronunciation too, which hadn’t been part of the original request.
At the end, he asked if I had WeChat or Facebook, so now I honestly can’t even tell whether he enjoyed the lesson or not. The communication barrier was that difficult.
The problem is… I really don’t want to continue teaching him because the lessons would probably be extremely stressful every time. But I’m also scared that if I block him or refuse future lessons, he might leave me my first bad review ever.
Has anyone else dealt with students where the language barrier was just too big to make the lessons workable? How did you handle it professionally?
EDIT: I was probably not clear enough but I was teaching a language which is not English, so there were 3 languages involved here, making it more complex