French tutoring that gets your child speaking from the first lesson

Is French worth adding when your child already has a full timetable?

French tutoring at LiveTutor is one-to-one lessons for complete beginners through the exam years, covering British, American and French curricula plus GCSE, IGCSE, IB and DELF and DALF preparation. Lessons run 60 minutes in LiveTutor's own online classroom with video and a shared whiteboard, and every lesson includes spoken French: the tutor converses with your child, corrects pronunciation as it slips, and sets short speaking practice between lessons. French lessons cost $15 a lesson, the single rate published on the LiveTutor pricing page, bought as a weekly plan of 1 to 5 lessons a week billed monthly, and the first lesson is a free trial.

Many British and American schools in the Gulf offer French as an option from Year 7 or 8, and families weigh it carefully because it stays with the student into the IGCSE or GCSE years. The decision deserves a realistic view of the load, and a good tutor gives one: French is cheap to start and compounding thereafter, which means early regular practice is far cheaper than rescue work in Year 10.

Families already inside a French curriculum, in a Mission Française or Lycée, face the opposite question: the language of instruction is French, so every other subject silently becomes French immersion, and the subject that still needs deliberate teaching is often French itself, the grammar and essay technique the school assumes are native.

Which French curricula and exams do your tutors teach?

Our tutors teach GCSE French for AQA and Edexcel, IGCSE French for Cambridge (including French as a Second Language), IB French at ab initio, standard and higher level, and DELF and DALF preparation for families on the French national system. Where your child's school teaches the French curriculum from CP upwards, we match a tutor who teaches that programme rather than a British exam course.

Tell us the course and the board when you enquire, exactly as you would for maths or English. A tutor preparing a student for Cambridge IGCSE French Second Language is training a different skill from one preparing a native speaker for the bac de français, and the matching makes sure your child gets the right one.

What does a French lesson look like?

Speaking comes first. Every lesson opens with conversation at your child's level, because the skill that matters most is not grammar recall but the ability to say something, hear it is wrong, and self-correct mid-sentence. The tutor corrects pronunciation as it slips rather than saving corrections for later, since fossilised accents are much harder to fix a year on.

Grammar is taught in context, then drilled out of context where the exam demands it: verb tenses, agreements, and the idioms that earn credit in writing tasks. In exam years lessons cycle through the four skills the papers examine, listening, reading, speaking and writing, with past-paper tasks marked against the official mark schemes.

Between lessons the work is short and daily rather than long and weekly: ten minutes of spoken practice and a vocabulary set the tutor checks at the start of the next session.

Is one lesson a week enough for a language?

For keeping pace with school, one weekly lesson plus daily short practice works well. For real acceleration, especially from a low starting point, two lessons a week beat one, because languages are learned through frequency. Families who want French as a genuine skill rather than a grade can move to two lessons a week in the first year, then drop back to one once the habit is built.