iTalki for Homeschool Foreign Language Conversation Practice (Review)
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It’s always been a dream of mine to teach my children Portuguese.
When I was in graduate school, I traveled to Brazil for research and fell in love with the country’s language and its rich cultural heritage. After that, I knew that I wanted to include Portuguese in some way in our homeschool—it was just too fun a language not to.
But, as a non-native speaker, I knew that I couldn’t do it alone. If my kids were going to learn Portuguese, I would need support to help us stay on track and get my kids the conversation practice they needed to learn the language themselves. Last summer I started looking into Portuguese tutoring for my rising kindergartener, but I ran into a few problems. First, our area doesn’t have a lot of native Portuguese speakers, and the tutors we did find charged exorbitant prices. Second, with a new baby and toddler, I knew that leaving the house this year would be a major challenge (and it was!). Where was I going to find someone to help my kids learn Portuguese?
Luckily, I found iTalki.
If you haven’t heard of iTalki, let me introduce you. iTalki is an online community of language educators who offer live tutoring in pretty much any language you’re interested in learning—from Spanish to Polish to Thai. You choose the tutor that you’d like to work with—all offer trial sessions—and then customize the tutoring schedule and content to match your child’s needs.
We signed up with iTalki at the beginning of the school year and now, having used it for a few months, I am ready to offer my review. Here’s the bottom line, though: I think that iTalki is a great resource for homeschool families seeking affordable, convenient, and high-quality conversation practice for their kids.
Want to know if it’s a fit for your family? Read on!
Why I Love iTalki: Affordable, Convenient Conversation Practice
There are a lot of reasons to love iTalki, but here are my top six:
I love iTalki because it connects my kids with experienced, kid-friendly tutors. As a language teacher myself, it was really important to me to find a tutor who had worked with kids before and knew how to engage young children in online classes—which is honestly no easy task! Since the website lets you filter tutors according to their experience with kids and/or teens and do trial classes with them, you can pick one that will work well with your child. We were easily able to find Miss Helen, our Portuguese tutor, who keeps my 6-year-old on task with lessons that are aural and visual (to help him pay attention) and tailored to his interests. We love her!
I love iTalki because it fits our family’s budget. Online language classes can be expensive for homeschool families, but online tutoring with iTalki is incredibly affordable. Tutors set their own prices, so what you will pay does vary, but the average range for an hour-long lesson is $7-15 USD. That’s much less expensive than most classes or in-person tutoring!
I love iTalki because it fits our family’s (sometimes crazy) schedule. Since I’m homeschooling with a high needs baby, our weekly schedule has changed throughout the year as we’ve had to fit in extra doctors appointments and shifting nap schedules. This hasn’t been an issue with iTalki, however . In fact, it’s been easy to change our lesson schedule to work for us. With iTalki, you check your tutor’s availability online and choose the time slots that work for you, scheduling hours or months in advance. That kind of flexibility has been essential to us!
I love iTalki because I can customize it to exactly what my children need. Since my oldest is still in kindergarten, his attention span for online lessons is still pretty short. With iTalki, that’s not a problem; we schedule 30-minute lessons and he’s able to follow along the entire time. Since he’s so young, I do the lessons along with him, which our tutor was fine with (and which I recommend to other families with young kids). If I want Xavi to get extra practice with a particular set of vocabulary words, all I have to do is let Helen know ahead of time, and she (like other iTalki tutors) will tailor our future sessions to his exact need.
I love iTalki because it complements any homeschool language curriculum. iTalki itself isn’t a standalone curriculum, but it pairs nicely with any curriculum that your child may be using at home, online, or in a co-op. And, to put it in stronger terms, if your child is only studying a foreign language at home, without anyone else to practice speaking and listening with, then iTalki may be a necessary component of your child’s language studies. After all, language learning involves all four skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking—and iTalki ensures that your child gets the latter two. If you’re looking for a homeschool foreign language curriculum, by the way, check out my homeschool Spanish curriculum round-up and my homeschool French curriculum round-up for easy-to-use lists of what’s available for every family and budget!
I love iTalki because it gives my kids a chance to learn from other cultures. The real reason why we’re so focused on language learning in our homeschool is that we are committed to raising our children as global citizens. I want my kids to use their language skills to learn about people from different places and cultures—and to befriend them. Our iTalki tutor has become a new friend and a window into Brazilian culture, and we love learning about her home country in our sessions with her.
These reasons are why we’ll be continuing to use iTalki to support our Portuguese studies in the future—we’re just so pleased with it!
Making the Most of Your iTalki Tutoring Experience
Based on our experience using iTalki as a family and my experience as a language teacher, I’d like to recommend some quick tips to help you make the most of your iTalki experience:
Do trial lessons with potential tutors. To ensure that your child will enjoy his/her iTalki tutoring sessions, do a quick half-hour trial with tutors that you’re considering. It’s so worth your time. You’ll find out if your tutor is a good fit and is willing to work with your family. Be sure to ask about their experience teaching kids and what tools and activities they like to use to keep kids engaged with online learning.
Don’t be afraid to use a community tutor. Some of the tutors on iTalki are professional teachers and others are known as “community tutors,” meaning that they don’t have experience working as a language teacher for pay. Some of these individuals, however, are excellent teachers—like our Miss Helen! She is currently in school to be a language teacher and I can attest that she’s great at her job! Community tutors also tend to charge less than professional teachers, so they can be a good fit for families with a tight budget.
Have your students do their online lessons in as public a place as possible. I am really serious about Internet safety. Because of that, while I do trust iTalki’s teachers, I also recommend that families do iTalki lessons on a computer that’s in a more “public” part of the house. It’s just an extra precaution.
With younger children, consider doing their lessons with or alongside them. As much as it is possible, I suggest that parents be available as a helping hand for younger children doing iTalki lessons—not only to monitor their progress, but also to serve as tech support.
Communicate, communicate, communicate with your tutor. If your child has an upcoming quiz that he needs to practice specific vocabulary for, tell your tutor! If your child is struggling with pronunciation, tell you tutor! If your child wants to learn about dinosaurs in another language, tell your tutor! The more information you give your tutor, the better he or she will be able to teach your child. Two-minute weekly check-ins before or after lessons can help the whole experience go more smoothly.
I hope that this is a helpful resource for those of you looking for something to complement your homeschool Spanish curriculum, your homeschool French curriculum, or any other language you’re studying at home. If you have any questions about our experience with iTalki or how to make the most of yours, let me know in the comments and I’ll get back to you!
