IB Diploma · Years 12-13
IB Italian tutors
Language B at SL or HL, with HL adding literary works alongside the core themes. The productive skills carry substantial weight, and students who have learned Italian largely by exposure often need deliberate work on formal written register.
- USD 30-36 per hour
- One-to-one, online
- Free 1-hour trial class
What IB Diploma actually demands
Six subjects plus Theory of Knowledge, the Extended Essay and CAS. The workload is the defining feature, and the Internal Assessments, coursework worth a substantial share of each subject grade, are what most often slip.
Regular and phonetic, which makes early progress fast. The difficulty arrives with compound past tenses, pronoun combinations and the subjunctive in formal registers.
Where IB Italian students lose marks
- Auxiliary choice between essere and avere applied inconsistently in the passato prossimo
- Combined pronouns avoided, which limits the range of expression marks reward
- Vocabulary acquired passively through exposure rather than actively for production
- Formal written register never practised, so writing tasks read as speech
Is this the right subject at this level?
Students taking Italian at school or preparing for study in Italy, and those who can hold a conversation but cannot yet write with the accuracy exams require.
What it costs
USD 30-36 per 60-minute one-to-one lesson at IB Diploma, the same rate in every city we teach in. Billed monthly against lessons actually taught, with no prepaid blocks and no minimum commitment.
Paired lessons (2 students) are USD 21-25 per student. Small group lessons (up to 6 students) are USD 15-18 per student. What each format is good for is here.
How we teach it
One-to-one, online, with a shared whiteboard. The first thing we establish is the exact syllabus the student is entered for: schools do not always publish the version they actually enter, and preparing for the wrong paper structure wastes a term.
After that the work is diagnostic: a past paper under timed conditions, marked together against the published scheme, to find out where the marks are genuinely going. That is almost always more useful than covering the syllabus again more slowly. The full process is here.
Italian: questions parents ask
What is the main structural hurdle?
The compound past tenses, specifically choosing between essere and avere as the auxiliary and getting agreement right. It is the point at which students who were progressing comfortably start making errors in nearly every sentence.
Why does written work read like speech?
Because formal register is rarely practised. Italian has a clear distinction between conversational and written formal styles, and writing tasks are marked against the register the question specified.
Is Italian easier than French or Spanish?
It is phonetic and regular, so early progress is fast. The later difficulty is comparable: pronoun combinations and the subjunctive in formal contexts are where the real work sits.