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Report structures

The language tutor session report.

A language report records what the learner produced, in their own words, rather than what the tutor presented. The four sections are concepts covered, progress, homework and next focus, and progress is measured in what came out unprompted.

An adult learning a language is the hardest client to keep, because progress is real and invisible at the same time. Six weeks in they still cannot follow a film, so it feels like nothing has happened, and the only evidence to the contrary is a record of what they could not say in week one. That is what the progress section is for, and it is why quoting the learner back to themselves is the most useful thing a language report does.

01The four sections

The four names this kind of work gets, and nothing to fill in.

  1. 01Concepts covered
  2. 02Progress
  3. 03Homework
  4. 04Next focus

You are not choosing this from a gallery. You answer one question when you sign up and these four become the shape every comes back in. Any of them can be renamed, added to or removed, and your version is what you get from then on.

02A finished report

Not a blank table. The document, written out.

Invented learner: Marc, adult beginner in Spanish, session 9 of 20, weekly.

Concepts covered
Past tense of regular verbs in conversation rather than on paper. Twenty minutes of nothing but questions about last weekend, no notes allowed.
Progress
Marc produced eleven past tense verbs unprompted, and only two of them were wrong. In session four he produced none at all without stopping to conjugate out loud first. He still falls back to the infinitive when he is nervous, which happens in the first two minutes and then stops.
Homework
Record two minutes on your phone about Saturday. Do not write it first. Send it before Wednesday and I will mark the verbs only.
Next focus
The two irregulars he keeps avoiding, which are the two he will need most, and the first five minutes of the session in Spanish only.

Every person, session and number above was written for this page. No real client is shown. The four section names are not samples: they are the sections the product fills in today.

03What clients ask for

Three things the reader of this report is actually looking for.

  • Evidence that they are better than they were, since their own sense of it is unreliable and usually pessimistic.
  • Something to do between lessons that is not a worksheet, because an adult with a job will not do a worksheet.
  • To know which mistakes matter and which ones a native speaker would not even notice.

04What goes wrong

Four mistakes, and each one costs a renewal rather than a mark.

  • Reporting grammar points taught rather than language produced. A learner is not a syllabus.
  • Correcting everything in the report, which reads as a list of failures after a session that felt good.
  • Homework that needs a desk. Two minutes on a phone gets done and a worksheet does not.
  • Never quoting the learner. One sentence they actually said, written down, is worth a paragraph of assessment.

05How it gets written

Five steps, and four of them take no time at all.

  1. 01Record the session

    Record on a phone, a laptop or the call software you already work on, with everybody in the session having agreed out loud first.

  2. 02Upload the recording

    Upload the file when the session ends, or paste a transcript if your call software already made one.

  3. 03Read the draft

    The draft comes back in about a minute, in the four sections: Concepts covered, Progress, Homework, Next focus.

  4. 04Correct it

    Change anything that is wrong and add anything the recording missed. Nothing goes anywhere until you have done this.

  5. 05Send it

    It goes to the client under your own name and stays on their own page with every report before it.

06Where this came from

Two sources outside this company.

Nearby

Try it on one session

Bring one recording and read what comes back in these four sections. No account and no card, and the 7 day trial needs no card either.