How To Become A Freelance Language Tutor

If you have a passion for languages and the ability to pass on your knowledge clearly, getting into language tutoring could be ideal for you. Whether you’re interested in making an additional income as a side hustle or are looking for a career change, tutoring can be a highly rewarding vocation.

There are currently over 7,000 languages spoken in the world today. Around 44% of them are endangered, some with fewer than 1,000 remaining users. For 3.6 billion people, approaching half of the world’s population, their native tongue is one the 20 most popular languages worldwide.

With many reasons to learn languages, including work, travel, family, friends, or just as a hobby, there’s no shortage of people wanting to learn a new language.

In this article, you’ll find out what language tutors do, the qualifications and skills you’ll need, and how much you can expect to earn as a language tutor.

Which Language Should You Choose?

Your choice of which language to teach might be very obvious. If you only speak English, for example, teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) would be the easiest option.

You might be bilingual due to having family members who speak different languages, or as a result of having to learn another language after moving to a new country.

On the other hand, you might have studied a foreign language at university, or for work or travel purposes, and decide to teach this language.

If you’re multilingual, you’ll need to decide if you’re going to teach more than one language, or just stick to teaching your strongest language.

The Most Widely Spoken Languages

Although your choice of language or languages to teach will often be an obvious one, if you have more than one option, or want to study a language to eventually teach, it’s useful to know which languages are the most widely spoken.

Here’s a table of the top 20 languages, in terms of total users (both native and non-native) taken from the Ethnologue website:

What Qualifications and Skills Do You Need?

There’s no formal requirement to have qualifications to teach your chosen language, but if you have some already, or decide to gain some qualifications, this could work to your advantage.

Perhaps surprisingly, apart from EFL teachers, most language tutors don’t have any formal qualifications to teach their language. Even so, if you have teaching experience, this is certainly an advantage to you as a language tutor.

Some language tutors will have a degree or other high-level qualification in the language they teach, and this can certainly be helpful. However, it’s more important to have a decent level of proficiency and fluency in the language you’re teaching.

Equally important is an aptitude for teaching, great communication skills, and an ability to empathise with your students.

How to Start a Language Tutoring Business

There are several routes you can take if you want to teach languages. You could advertise your services on a website or with flyers, posters, or business cards.

Alternatively, you might have some other opportunity to bring up the fact that you’re offering language tutoring to friends, families and acquaintances. This could lead to you gaining your first students, especially if there’s plenty of demand for learning your chosen language in the group of people who hear of your offer to teach it.

Where Will You Do Your Tutoring?

An important decision you need to make in the planning stage is where you’ll deliver your language lessons. You might decide to teach your students at your home or theirs, or at a public place.

Teaching online is an increasingly common alternative. There are several platforms to choose from, including Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet, all of which have genuinely free versions, although of course you’ll get extra features if you choose a paid version.

What Age Group Will You Teach?

Another factor to consider is the age group you want to tutor. Although many of the skills required are the same, teaching primary aged children is a very different experience to teaching adults.

There’s plenty of demand for teaching languages to school-age children, particularly when it comes to preparing them for upcoming exams. Likewise, learning another language is very popular amongst adults.

It’s certainly possible to teach students across a wide age range, but you might prefer to focus on a particular age group. Targeting a niche by specialising in teaching a particular type of student will probably ultimately be the better choice, and this will also cut down on how many resources you’ll need.

The Benefits of Starting to Teach for Free

It’s likely you’ll be keen to start making money as soon as possible from teaching languages, but there are several good reasons to begin your journey by teaching some lessons for free.

There are several language exchange apps, many with free versions. These are a great way to connect with speakers of other languages.

Here are a few language exchange apps and websites:

• Speaky - this allows you to very quickly connect to learners of your chosen language who are online at the time

• HelloTalk - a very highly rated language exchange app with plenty of features

• The Mixxer - a video chat language exchange website

• Meetup - this is a social media platform where you can organise virtual or in-person activities, gatherings, and events. It has a language exchange section with over 2.5 million members.

The experience you’ll gain by tutoring for free is something you can add to your CV, which could work to your advantage for future job applications. However, more importantly, you’ll gain practice in teaching and it will give you the chance to see if private language tuition is for you.

Gaining Qualifications

As mentioned, there’s no requirement to gain any formal qualifications in your target language or teaching this language. Nevertheless, it’s an option you might want to pursue, to add to your credibility and perhaps as a way to set you apart from other language tutors.

When it comes to Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL), you’re often expected to have a formal qualification. The industry standard is the Cambridge CELTA (Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults).

All CELTA courses last for 120 hours, but you can choose how quickly you complete it. They have an intensive 4-week course, or you could take things more slowly and complete your studies over a longer period of several months or a year.

Having a bachelor’s degree is often, but not always, a minimum requirement if you want to teach English as a foreign language.

If you’re teaching another language, you’ll need to have a decent ability, with a CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) level of at least B2 or C1.

Online Language Tutoring Agencies

Tutoring agencies have the potential of making the process of setting up and running your tutoring business much more straightforward. Once you’re signed up with an agency, you’ll be visible to a large number of potential students, especially if you plan to do at least some of your tutoring online.

You have many options to choose from, so we’ll just focus on a few here.

Preply

Preply was founded by three Ukrainian entrepreneurs and has grown to an international organisation with over 500 staff of 60 different nationalities.

Preply take a cut of the amount you’re paid every hour, but take on most of the admin. This greatly simplifies the process of tutoring compared to doing everything yourself.

Tutorful

Just like Preply, Tutorful takes a cut of your hourly rate for each lesson you teach, but deals with most of the admin themselves.

Something that sets Tutorful apart from Preply is that it’s a UK-based company, so you won’t be competing against tutors from across the globe.

Something to be aware of is that they track how many hours you’ve taught and display this in your profile. Although this is useful for students, it can make it difficult to stand out from other tutors until you have more experience. On the plus side, tutors with lots of hours under their belt can generally charge more per hour.

italki

Italki is great for teaching and learning languages online, and you could be tutoring any keen learners across the globe. Again, they take a cut of your hourly rate.

A potential downside of italki is the sheer number of teachers on the site, which means you’ll have plenty of competition, especially for the more popular languages.

Superprof

Tutors can set up a profile for free on superprof, whilst students pay a monthly membership fee. The students are free to contact any teacher they want to, and you then both agree on fees and set up payments yourself. Anything you make from lessons is yours to keep, as superprof don’t take a cut.

How Much Do Language Tutors Charge?

As with other forms of private tutoring, fees charged by language tutors vary widely. They tend to start at around £14 per hour and go all the way up to around £100 per hour, although it’s unusual for tutors to charge this much.

The amount you charge will often be down to you to set, although some sites might have set fees, or ranges of hourly rates that tutors can charge, depending on qualifications, hours taught, or experience.

Summary

For many people, teaching a language that you’re passionate about could be a dream job. Being a language tutor also has the potential to give you a great deal of freedom, as you can choose when you work.

Language tutoring can make a great side hustle, or provide a lucrative full-time career. Other side hustles you could try include selling digital art online, copywriting, or perhaps the ultimate side-hustle, Matched Betting.