Kids’ English

No. For several specific jobs a local Arabic speaking English teacher is the better instrument, and for other jobs she is clearly the weaker one. Treating the question as a ranking is what makes families pay for the wrong help at the wrong moment: a father books foreign teachers all year and watches his son’s

Adjust the content first. In most cases where a child has been with the same online English teacher for months and suddenly starts dragging their feet, the teacher is not the problem and the material is. Changing teachers is a real option, and sometimes the right one, but it is the second thing to try,

Your child sat the placement test last September and came out at one level. Twelve months of lessons later, the report still shows the same level. The fees kept going out, the classes were attended, and nobody told you anything was wrong. That is frustrating, and it is also diagnosable. A child between nine and

Your seven year old finishes a lesson, the teacher writes that participation was good, and you sit next to the screen having heard almost nothing. The answers came out somewhere between a whisper and a mumble. In Arabic the same child argues loudly with a sibling across two rooms. So the volume exists. It just

Your nine year old has been in lessons for a year and answers the teacher without hesitating. Ask him what he did at school and you get a full sentence. Then you notice something odd: in twelve months you have never once heard him ask anything in English. Not a question to the teacher, not

Most families decide within an hour of the trial ending, almost always on the wrong evidence. The lesson felt nice. The teacher smiled a lot. Your daughter laughed twice and said thank you at the end. Then a consultant calls while that warm feeling is still in the room, and you commit to months of

Your seven year old picks up an English storybook, reads a full page out loud, barely stumbles, and the words come out sounding right. Then you ask what happened in the story, and you get silence. Or a guess from the picture. Or one word: “a dog.” The page was read. Nothing from it stayed.

Twelve months in, most parents in Saudi Arabia are holding the same piece of information: a level code on a report, maybe a percentage beside it, and a consultant who says things are going well. That code is not useless, but it is the weakest signal you have. Level labels move when a curriculum is

Yes, and your accent is not the part that decides the outcome. If you have been avoiding English with your child because you say ben instead of pen, or because your sister in law commented on your th sound, you can stop worrying about the sound and start thinking about the format. What you practise