English language teachers’ conceptualizations of one-to-one private tutoring: An international phenomenographic study

Abstract

Private English tutoring, understood as the paid English teaching service offered to students to supplement their learning of English at school or prepare them for an examination in English, has become a popular out-of-school learning activity. In order to obtain deeper insights into its intricacies, the need arises to examine the experience of one of its pivotal stakeholders – the private tutors. This article is based on a phenomenographic study with a view to investigating the conceptions of private tutoring held by 15 English teachers from three countries (Poland, Portugal, and Turkey) who offer private teaching services in English in their local contexts. The findings suggest that there are at least three conceptions according to which private tutoring can be experienced by the participants: as a source of income, as helping, and as professional development. The study also poses the question if there is space for formal training of private tutors and calls for further research into English private tutoring

Understanding Distributed Tutorship in Online Language Tutoring

“…on Ringle whose first language was not English. Their occupation distribution is: employed for wages (362), student (92), out of work (32), self-employed (25), homemaker (5), military (1), retired (1), or unable to work (1). Their educational background distribution is bachelor's degree (298), master's degree (126), some college credits without degree (39), professional degree including doctor or lawyer (22), doctoral degree (20), graduated elementary/middle/high school (9), none (2), or vocational training (1).…”

“…Previous work has explored the characteristics of different stakeholders in online language tutoring platforms, for example, the learners' demographics [23] and motivations [37] for learning, and tutors' conceptions and reasons for giving online tutoring services [32,38]. However, the influence of distributed tutorship on language learning is weakly investigated.…”