How to Prepare for Your First Online English Lesson

You do not need to study for your first lesson. You need to prepare for it, and that takes about 30 minutes: five written answers, one tech check, and a clear idea of what a good first hour should give you. Here is how to prepare for a first English lesson online so the tutor can start working from minute one.

How to prepare for a first English lesson online: write down five answers

The most useful thing you can bring to a first lesson is not a textbook. It is five honest answers. I ask these questions in every first lesson, and students who have thought about them beforehand get a plan in twenty minutes instead of forty.

Question two is the one people skip, and it is the most valuable. "I want to improve my speaking" gives me nothing to work with. "The pharmacist could not understand my address" gives me a sound, a situation and a reason to fix it this month. Write down the actual sentence you said if you can remember it.

Question four should be honest, not ambitious. A ten-minute daily habit you keep beats a 45-minute plan you abandon in week two. I build the homework around the number you give me, and I would rather build around ten real minutes.

Test the tech the day before, not five minutes before

First lessons that start late almost always start late because of sound, and every one of those minutes comes out of your lesson. Run this check the day before, on the same device, in the same room, at roughly the same time of day.

• Headphones with a microphone. Not laptop speakers. Speakers send my voice back through your microphone, and the echo cancellation cuts the quiet consonants I need to hear, like the difference between s and th. Any wired earbuds with a mic are fine.
• Camera at eye level, face lit from the front. I watch your mouth in pronunciation work. A window behind you turns your face into a silhouette. Sit facing the window, or put a lamp behind the laptop.
• A quiet room, door closed. Kitchen noise, a TV or a fan hides exactly the sounds we are working on.
• Open the classroom link once. My lessons run in a built-in online classroom with video, chat and shared notes, not on Zoom. Click the link in your confirmation email the day before, allow camera and microphone, and close it. Then the permissions are already set on lesson day.
• Phone on silent, notifications off. A message ping in the middle of a minimal-pair drill resets your concentration.
• Water and a notebook. Fifty minutes of focused speaking is more talking than most people do in a normal hour.

You will get a reminder 24 hours before and again 1 hour before the lesson, so use the first reminder as the trigger for the tech check.

What to say in the first five minutes

Students often open with an apology: "Sorry, my English is not very good." Please do not. You booked a lesson at B1 or above with a tutor who teaches nothing else; your English is good enough to be here. Open with your answers to questions one and two instead. Something like:

"I'm here because clients on calls ask me to repeat myself, and last week one heard can when I said can't. I want to be clearer at work, and I'd like you to be direct with me about what you hear."

That last sentence matters. Say it out loud. Many tutors soften feedback by default because they are afraid of discouraging you. Asking for directness in the first minute gives them permission to tell you the truth, and the truth is what you are paying for. If you have a fear of speaking that goes beyond normal nerves, say that too. I wrote about how speaking fear is built and unbuilt, and knowing about it changes how I run the hour.

If you have questions about how the tutor works, the first five minutes is also the time. I put together twelve questions to ask an English tutor; pick the two or three that matter most to you rather than reading the whole list.

What a good first lesson should give you

By the end of the hour, with any tutor, you should have four things. If you do not, that tells you something about the tutor.

1. An assessment in specific terms. Not "your pronunciation is quite good." Something like: "Your vowels are clear. Your th becomes t at the start of words, your stress in longer words often lands on the wrong syllable, and you drop the final s when you speak fast."
2. A priority order. Which of those affects how people understand you most, and therefore comes first. A tutor who gives you a list without an order has not decided how to teach you.
3. One thing you can already do differently. A first lesson should include at least ten minutes of actual teaching, so you leave able to make one sound or one stress pattern that you could not make at the start.
4. Written notes. Everything above, in the classroom or in a document you can open tomorrow. Spoken feedback is gone by dinner.

Judging the whole lesson, including the personality fit, gets its own article: what to expect from a trial lesson and how to judge it. The short version is that a lesson that was pleasant but gave you none of the four things above was a conversation, not a lesson.

How the first lesson with me works

My first lesson is 50 minutes, costs $25 instead of the usual $30, and runs like this:

• Minutes 0-8: your five answers. We go through the goal sheet. I ask follow-up questions about the situation where your English failed you.
• Minutes 8-15: a short reading. You read a passage I have built to contain every sound and stress pattern that gives learners trouble. I do not correct; I take notes.
• Minutes 15-22: free speech. You talk about your work or something you did last weekend. Reading and free speech show different problems, and I need both. The sounds that survive reading and die in free speech are the ones we will spend the most time on.
• Minutes 22-35: the assessment. I show you what I heard, in order of impact on clarity. Usually three to five items. I explain why each one matters with an example from your own speech from the last twenty minutes.
• Minutes 35-47: we fix one thing. I pick the item that will give you the biggest change for the least effort, often word stress or one consonant, and we work on it the way a normal lesson would: mechanics, pairs, sentences.
• Minutes 47-50: the plan. How many lessons per target, roughly, what to practice this week, and how often to meet. Students like So Yeon and Cesar have told me the written plan was the moment it felt real.

If you continue, every following lesson follows the structure I describe in what happens in a pronunciation lesson. If you do not, you still leave with the assessment and the plan, and you can take those to anyone.

What not to prepare

Preparation can go too far, and I see three versions of it.

Do not memorize an introduction. A rehearsed "My name is Ana, I am 34, I work in logistics" tells me nothing about your real speech, because rehearsed speech uses different mouth habits from spontaneous speech. I need to hear you think in English.

Do not study grammar the night before. The first lesson is not a test. There is no score, and nothing you review in one evening will change what I hear.

Do not bring a long list of every problem you think you have. Students who have studied for years often arrive with a list of twenty issues from apps and previous teachers. Most of those lists are wrong, because the people who wrote them could not hear your speech either. Bring the five answers and let the assessment produce the list.

After the lesson: the ten-minute habit that decides everything

Within an hour of the lesson ending, read the notes once. That is all. Reading them while the sound is still in your ear means you keep far more of it. Then, that same day, do the first ten minutes of the homework, even if the next lesson is a week away. The first day sets the habit. Students who wait until the day before the next lesson arrive having practiced once; students who start the same day arrive having practiced six times. Same lesson, same tutor, completely different result. How often you meet also matters, and I break that down in how many English lessons a week you really need.

What to do this week

Take a piece of paper and write your five answers now, especially the sentence from the last time your English let you down. Tomorrow, do the six-point tech check in the room you will use. Then book. If you would like that first lesson to be with me, you can book a first lesson for $25 on a live calendar in your own timezone, and you can reschedule free up to 24 hours before if your week changes. You can read more about my background on my page. Bring the paper.

Questions students ask