What is a personal ESL trainer? I've been asked this question many times as there seems to be a great deal of confusion regarding the use of the terms teacher, tutor, and trainer in the field of ESL.

An ESL teacher teaches either individuals or groups and works according to a preset course. A tutor works with individuals to help them keep up with or to enrich their coursework. An ESL trainer does not have any preset course at all: The student's particular level and needs become the syllabus.

Clearly, this kind of work is extremely challenging but can also be very lucrative and, to my mind, is the most satisfying job in the field of ESL. It has been my specialty for more than a decade now and I've even created an ESL Trainers program based on various approaches and methodology that I developed and fine-tuned over the years.

The program begins, understandably, with the question: Why become a personal ESL trainer? For starters, for those who enjoy challenges, it's one of the highest paid sectors of the field. Moreover, it allows the trainer a great deal of flexibility in his or her personal schedule.

ESL trainers "go to school when they go to work": Though their job is to teach adults from diverse fields, they must learn from them at the same time. The trainer has to create lessons for the trainee involving subjects about which the trainee knows far more than the trainer does!

Because English is the lingua franca of today's world, there is a huge reservoir of professionals, academics, and businesspeople in all parts of the globe needing and wanting to improve their language skills. Clearly, these potential students will opt for individual instruction whenever possible and they or their companies are willing to pay the accepted rates.

Wherever they are, ESL professionals are constantly approached and asked to teach these people. Some accept and go about the job with a trial-and-error type of methodology; the more prudent, however, are wary of jumping into these unknown waters and decline.

This is a pity, as there does exist a tried-and-true system for a personal ESL trainer to "make the student into the course syllabus"! And it's a fully integrated system based on very specific guiding principles, not just a haphazard assortment of techniques and materials.

What are these principles? Foremost among them is the confidence factor (C factor): Even as the trainer is gauging his or her student's progress in terms of correctness and fluency during his lessons, the student will be gauging his or her own progress in terms of the C factor in his real world. Increasing confidence without sacrificing the goal of improving correctness and fluency has been always a paramount consideration in ESL training. This goal can be accomplished by adopting the right approach, applying effective techniques, and choosing suitable material to work from.

In addition to guiding principles, there are a number of practical issues related to the world of ESL trainers:

1. What materials to use? Generally, these students have studied English at various points in the past but there are gaps in their knowledge and/or their ability to use what they know. It is therefore evident that the "four skills integrated approach" of many textbooks is not time-efficient for your lessons with them. Nowadays, there has been a discernible trend among ESL publishers to produce coursebooks for English for special purposes (ESP) and how to evaluate them in relation to your student's specific needs. Where can we find these materials and how to get some directions about what to choose?
2. How to find students? People will approach you, but it is far more businesslike and efficient to market your skills to a target audience. Where and how you go about doing this will be critical to your professional success.
3. How to get started? Never accept a student without first testing his or her level and determining his or her needs. On the basis of this data, you should first discuss with your potential students their expectations, always being frank about what you believe is possible. Better to lose a job than to invite failure! Only then should you contract for an initial block of lessons, deciding on a mutually suitable venue and viable schedule.
4. What to do in the actual lesson? Always use a standard format for the lesson, one that incorporates all the language elements―but the time spent on each should remain flexible. What does this mean in practical terms? The four language elements are (selected) pronunciation items, vocabulary items (new or misused), grammar points (new or misused), and relevant terms and expressions. Only a single page should be devoted to each lesson in the student's notebook, and the lesson's work is recorded so it can be reviewed at the end of each lesson, at the beginning of the following one, and during review lessons. Because the actual materials used in lessons (e.g., small talk, relevant texts, the student's own current issues) will vary in the amount of lesson time they take up, it is critical to know which (and how many) items are suitable for inclusion. This lesson format is based on the first axiom of personal ESL trainers: "The student is the syllabus."

Miriam Lavi has been working in the field of ESL since 1965: She taught in high schools in New York City and in Israel; she prepared teaching materials for a reading laboratory in technical English for the Technological Institute; she taught English Language & Literature on the university level in China and concurrently at a scientific institute that shares its campus; and for over 25 years, she was co-owner and director of studies at a private language school for adults in Israel where she set the curriculum, did placement testing of incoming students, and provided ongoing training for the teaching staff. She is now semi-retired, and works as a personal ESL trainer for several select clients.

Mrs. Lavi is the author of the e-guide How to Become a Personal ESL Trainer, which has been available from her Web site since 2003 and in Kindle format from Amazon since 2010.

More information and articles by the author can be found on her Web site, www.esltrainers.com .