Private French tutoring at collège: goals, method and choosing a tutor

After six years of private tutoring, I find it particularly important not to sum up a difficulty in French with “he makes too many mistakes” or “she doesn’t understand texts”. A piece of written work usually lets you go much further: does the student understand the question? do they find the information in the text? do they know how to organise their answer? can they tell the parts of speech apart? do they genuinely check their agreements? do they have the vocabulary they need to express their thinking?

This distinction also matches what schools expect. At the start of the 2026 school year, 6e (the first year of collège, lower secondary school) falls under the new French curriculum for cycle 3 (the last two years of primary school and 6e), which came into force for this year group in 2025, while the new French curriculum for cycle 4 (5e, 4e and 3e, the last three years of collège) applies first in 5e in 2026-2027, then in 4e in 2027-2028 and in 3e in 2028-2029. Despite this gradual transition, the main needs remain clearly identifiable: reading, writing, speaking, vocabulary and the study of language.

1. Common difficulties in French at collège

French is a particular subject because one and the same difficulty can affect almost all the others. Hesitant reading slows down understanding of a text. A limited vocabulary restricts interpretation and writing. Fragile syntax can make an answer imprecise even when the idea is right.

The situations you can observe can be grouped into several categories.

Difficulty observed	What to check	Common misdiagnosis
The student reads but does not really understand the text.	Vocabulary, implicit information, links between sentences, the instruction.	Immediately concluding that they “don’t read enough”.
There are many spelling mistakes.	Agreements, conjugation, word spelling, checking over.	Simply doing more dictations without identifying the mistakes.
Answers are very short.	Understanding of the question, vocabulary, justification, sentence construction.	Interpreting this solely as a lack of effort.
Written work is disorganised.	Planning, paragraphs, flow of ideas, syntax.	Correcting only surface mistakes.
Grammar seems to be learned and then forgotten.	Understanding of the concept and ability to use it in a real sentence.	Having the student memorise a definition yet again without any hands-on practice.

National assessments also show that French skills do not all progress at the same pace. In the comprehensive assessments at the start of 6e, 5e and 4e carried out in September 2025 and published by the DEPP in June 2026, the rates of satisfactory mastery in 4e differ markedly by area: 41.3% in reading comprehension, 45.5% in spelling, 47.4% in grammar, 56.5% in fluency and 67.3% in vocabulary.

These figures do not mean that a student in a given category necessarily needs private tutoring. The DEPP (the statistics department of the French Ministry of Education) points out that its assessments give a snapshot of certain knowledge and skills and are not an exhaustive sweep of the curriculum. Above all, they show why “level in French” is too broad a category to define the support a student needs.

2. Reading, grammar, spelling and expression: what to prioritise?

When a collège student has several difficulties, trying to rework everything at once often leads to scattered sessions. You need to look for the problem that is causing the others.

If reading comprehension is fragile

Start by separating decoding from meaning. Some students read slowly and put so much attention into the words that they have few resources left to understand the whole. Others read fluently but do not know how to interpret an implicit sentence or connect several pieces of information.

On a short text, the tutor can ask:

1. Who is speaking or acting?
2. What information is given explicitly?
3. What does the text allow us to understand without saying it directly?
4. Which sentence justifies this interpretation?

That last question is essential. Answering correctly by intuition is not the same as knowing how to go back to the text to build an answer.

The new cycle 4 curriculum places particular emphasis on three complementary dimensions of reading: comprehension, interpretation and appreciation. The Éduscol resources published in April 2026 also highlight reading complete works and the reader’s gradual autonomy.

If grammar or spelling is the sticking point

Two extremes should be avoided: learning rules without ever applying them, or correcting mistakes in written work without going back to the grammatical mechanism.

Take:

Les élèves que le professeur accompagne progressent. (“The students the tutor supports are making progress.”)

To check the agreement of the verb, the student must be able to identify the subject of progressent. The group placed just before the verb contains “le professeur”, but that is not its subject. The subject is les élèves.

A good correction is therefore not limited to circling the ending. It rebuilds the process:

1. find the verb;
2. look for its subject;
3. identify whether it is singular or plural;
4. make the agreement;
5. reuse the procedure in another sentence.

Éduscol points out that the study of language must go beyond simply memorising rules: students need to manipulate the language and understand how it works syntactically, morphologically and semantically. The official resources also stress the need to use this knowledge to revise the texts students produce.

If written expression is the main problem

Weak written work does not necessarily mean the student “has no ideas”. They may have a correct idea but not know how to develop it.

For example, to the question “Why does this character seem brave?”, an answer such as:

He is brave because he is not afraid.

can become:

The character seems brave because he decides to face the danger despite his fear. The text states that he moves forward while the other characters retreat, which shows that he chooses to act despite the risk.

The second answer adds three skills: a precise idea, an element from the text and an explanation of the link between the two.

The levels of correction then need to be separated. A sentence can be well argued and contain an agreement mistake; conversely, a perfectly spelt sentence can remain thin or off topic. Correcting both dimensions is useful, but not necessarily at the same time.

A meta-analysis published in 2024 in Learning and Instruction, covering secondary school and university students, shows precisely that the type of feedback matters: corrections focused on surface features mainly benefit surface aspects, while feedback on structure and content does more to improve the deeper dimensions of writing. Approaches combining the two can act on both levels.

3. How do you diagnose the student’s real level?

The first French tutoring session should not begin with thirty grammar questions picked at random. Three real pieces of work often give more information:

• a recent assessment;
• a text studied in class with the student’s answers;
• a piece of written work or a developed answer.

From these documents, the tutor can test four dimensions.

1. Reading and understanding

Can the student find a piece of explicit information? Do they understand the key vocabulary? Can they make a simple inference and justify it with the text?

2. Command of the language

Can they identify what they need in order to correct their own mistakes? An agreement mistake corrected after the tutor says “look at your verb” is not equivalent to a mistake spotted spontaneously.

3. Building an answer

Do they know how to answer the question directly, develop an idea and use an example or a quotation when it is relevant?

4. Revising their own text

Give them two minutes to reread a paragraph they have just written without saying what they should look for. Observe what they correct. Then offer a checklist:

• have I answered the question?
• are my sentences complete?
• do my verbs agree with their subject?
• have I checked the agreements in noun phrases?
• have I repeated certain words unnecessarily?

The difference between the two readings shows the degree of autonomy.

A useful diagnosis then leads to one or two priorities. If the student understands texts very well but systematically loses the thread when writing, spending half of every session on reading questionnaires would not be very effective.

4. How often should tutoring sessions take place at collège?

There is no universal frequency that works for every student. The pace depends on the number of difficulties, how long they have been there, the level of autonomy and the work actually done between sessions.

Situation	Starting benchmark	Goal
Targeted difficulty in spelling or grammar	About 1 session a week	Understand a rule, practise it and then check it carries over into writing.
Difficulty with reading and comprehension	1 weekly session + short reading between sessions	Work regularly on comprehension, vocabulary and justification.
Fragile written expression	About 1 session a week	Write, correct and then rewrite between two appointments.
Several very fragile areas	A temporarily stepped-up pace if necessary	Separate the goals rather than overloading a single session.

These benchmarks are practical, not scientific norms. One hour a week can be more than enough for a student who goes back over the targeted points three times for fifteen minutes between sessions. It may have little effect if the tutor has to go over exactly the same rule in every session.

In French, regularity is particularly important because some skills require repeated production: writing, rereading, correcting, rewriting, coming across a word or a grammatical structure again.

The Education Endowment Foundation’s guidance on literacy in secondary schools recommends, among other things, explicitly supporting vocabulary, access to complex texts, writing tasks and struggling students. It does not set a number of hours of private tutoring: above all, it supports the idea that a difficulty in French benefits from being broken down into specific skills.

5. How can writing be worked on between two sessions?

To make progress in writing, the student has to write. That seems obvious, but a common mistake is to replace this practice with a lot of theory: lists of rules, conjugation sheets and corrections already written out.

Between two sessions, I prefer short, precise tasks.

For spelling

Choosing a single category of mistake for a few days can be more useful than asking them to “make fewer mistakes”.

Example: this week, the only goal is to get better at controlling subject-verb agreement.

• Day 1: five sentences to analyse.
• Day 3: a short paragraph in which to find the verbs and their subjects.
• Day 5: write eight lines, then reread them focusing solely on this agreement.

Once the reflex becomes more solid, a second target is added.

For written work

There is no need to write a full composition between every session. A student can work separately on:

• an introduction;
• an argued paragraph;
• a description;
• an answer with a quotation;
• rewriting a corrected paragraph.

This last step is particularly important. Reading the tutor’s correction does not force the student to change the way they work. Rewriting requires them to use the feedback they have received.

For reading

Ask “did you understand?” less often and “what makes you say that?” more often.

On a page of a novel, three questions can be enough:

1. summarise what has just happened in two sentences;
2. choose a word whose meaning is not obvious and explain it using the context;
3. put forward an interpretation and pick out the passage that supports it.

The new cycle 4 curriculum gives greater weight to reading complete works and makes vocabulary a teaching area in its own right. The aim is therefore not to turn every piece of personal reading into a school questionnaire, but to give the student tools to become gradually more autonomous with texts.

On NOEO, the tutor can extend this approach in the student space by setting out the work to prepare between two appointments. The session report can in particular record the topic covered, strengths, areas for improvement and the next priority, which avoids starting from scratch at each session.

6. Measuring progress without relying on the average alone

The French average remains useful information, but it often mixes dictations, reading tests, grammar questions, written work, oral work and literary assessments. A variation of a few points does not therefore always tell you what has really improved.

You need to track indicators directly linked to the goal of the tutoring.

Skill	Possible starting point	Concrete sign of progress
Comprehension	The student answers intuitively without going back to the text.	They justify their answers with a relevant passage.
Grammatical spelling	The same agreements are only corrected once pointed out.	The student spots more mistakes when rereading their own work.
Grammar	The definition is learned but poorly applied.	The student handles the concept correctly in new sentences.
Written expression	Ideas are simply placed side by side.	Paragraphs are structured and ideas more fully developed.
Vocabulary	The same vague words keep coming back.	The student appropriately reuses words met previously.
Autonomy	The tutor points out every correction to be made.	The student uses a reading or rereading strategy on their own.

A simple method is to keep a reference piece of work. After several weeks, ask for an exercise of the same kind with a new text or topic. You are then not just comparing two marks: you look at the precision of the answer, the structure, the categories of mistakes and the help needed.

Feedback also matters in this progress. As the meta-analysis cited above points out, the effect of feedback depends on what it targets: an effective correction must therefore be usable: “develop this idea by explaining the link with the quotation” is more actionable than a simple “lacks precision”.

The long-term aim is for the tutor to step in less on points already worked on. If, after several weeks, they still have to flag exactly the same mistakes before each correction, the method needs reviewing rather than simply extending the number of hours.

7. How do you choose a French tutor for collège?

A good French tutor for collège should not just write well or know literature. They must know how to observe a student’s work, rank the difficulties and explain the language concretely enough for a new strategy to be reused alone.

Before choosing, check seven points:

1. The level taught. Does the tutor know the expectations of collège and of the year group concerned?
2. Diagnostic ability. Do they ask for a piece of work or a text before suggesting a long list of exercises?
3. Command of the language. Can they explain grammar, spelling and syntax precisely instead of simply correcting?
4. Teaching writing. Do they have the student write and rewrite?
5. Reading work. Do they aim for understanding and interpretation rather than a series of ready-made answers?
6. Follow-up. Does the session lead to an identifiable priority before the next one?
7. The room left for the student. Does the tutor correct everything themselves, or gradually teach the student to spot their own mistakes?

Our guide to choosing a private tutor for your child goes further into criteria beyond the subject alone: experience, fit with the level, teaching approach and how the first session works.

For online tutoring, another question becomes important: can you really work on the student’s text? The tutor must be able to read a piece of work, annotate a passage or correct a sentence with them. Our guide to online private tutoring sets out the conditions for keeping this interaction at a distance.

On NOEO, the tutors listed have their file checked before their profile goes live and declare their subjects and levels themselves. For a collège student, the aim is therefore to choose a profile that is genuinely relevant for French at the level concerned, then to keep a thread of work going between sessions. The tutoring sessions offered by NOEO are currently online only.

Checklist: French support that is genuinely useful

• The need is defined more precisely than “improve French”.
• A real piece of work serves as the starting point.
• The tutor distinguishes reading, language and written expression.
• One or two priorities are worked on at a time.
• The student reads, writes and explains during the session.
• Mistakes are classified by cause, not simply counted.
• Corrections give an action to take.
• The student rewrites after receiving an important correction.
• A short piece of work is picked up again between sessions.
• Progress is measured through comparable tasks and autonomy, not only through the average.