With no language in common there is nothing to explain in, so nothing gets explained. Everything is shown: you do the thing, you do it while saying it, they do it on command, and then they do it while saying it. Four moves, in that order, for every single item.
That sequence is slower than explaining and it works from the first minute of the first lesson, which explaining cannot do at all.
Eight techniques for a class with almost no English
- establish the classroom phrases first: listen, repeat, work in pairs, again. These are the words that make every later lesson possible.
- grade your language, do not slow it. Speak at natural speed with simpler words, because slowed speech teaches a rhythm that does not exist.
- gesture and picture, not translation. A translated word is understood and not retained; a word attached to an object or a gesture is both.
- drill chorally before individually. The group protects the individual, and nobody is exposed before they are ready.
- total physical response: give instructions the class acts out. It produces comprehension without demanding speech, which is exactly what beginners need.
- yes or no questions before open ones, because they can be answered with a nod in the first week.
- use the students' names from minute one, which does more for a beginner class than any activity.
- silence is thinking. Waiting four seconds after a question feels unbearable and is where the answers come from.
Silence is the tool, not the problem
The hardest part of teaching a true beginner is not the language. It is standing still and saying nothing while somebody works out what you want, which for most teachers is unbearable for about three seconds.
What fills that silence is English the student cannot follow, and it does real damage in the first lesson: a beginner who spends the first twenty minutes not understanding anybody has learned that English is a thing that happens over their head. Everything you do afterwards is fighting that.
Say less than feels reasonable. One word repeated with an action beats a sentence, and the student's first successful response is worth more than any amount of exposure.
What they should have done by the end of lesson one
Said about twenty things, none of which were explained to them, and understood about forty. Not learned twenty words: said twenty things, out loud, correctly, and been understood.
That target changes what the lesson contains. It rules out anything abstract, anything about grammar, and most of what a coursebook puts in unit one, and it leaves objects in the room, actions you can perform, and the two or three phrases that let somebody ask for a repeat.
It also rules out the alphabet, which many teachers reach for first because it feels like a foundation. A beginner who can say fifteen useful things and cannot spell any of them is in a much better position than one who can recite twenty-six letters.
Where it stops: reaching for a translation
The stall is the moment a word will not land and somebody in the room speaks both languages, or a phone is on the table. Translating solves the immediate problem in two seconds and ends the English, and once it has happened three times the student stops trying to work anything out, because waiting is cheaper.
What makes it hard to resist is that it genuinely is faster in the moment. The cost is not in that word; it is that a beginner has to build the habit of tolerating partial understanding, and every translation tells them they do not have to.
The exception worth allowing is anything about the arrangements: money, times, whether they can come next week. Use whatever language settles it, quickly, and go back.
Drawing badly, on purpose
The whiteboard in your video call software, or a real one, is the tool that keeps the lesson in English when a word will not land. It is free and it is in every platform, and the reason it works is not the picture: it is that drawing is slow and imprecise, so the student is guessing while you draw, and guessing is what you wanted them doing.
It replaced reaching for a translation, which is the move it exists to make unnecessary.
A whiteboard's limitation is severe, and it is the reason demonstration matters more here than pictures do. A board handles concrete nouns and nothing else. You cannot draw again, before, maybe or try, and those are in the first fifty things a beginner needs, so most of a first lesson has to be acted rather than sketched.
What it looks like when it goes wrong
The recognisable failure is a first lesson in which the teacher talked and the student nodded. The student was polite, nothing was said in English by them, and they do not book a second one.
The second is a lesson that taught the names of things and no way to use them. Fifteen nouns and no verb produces a student who can label a room and cannot ask for anything in it, and the fix is to teach the phrase that makes the noun useful in the same breath as the noun.
The shape that this fits inside, and the reason the student should be producing from the first minutes, is a shape that works with one student or with twelve, and this corner of the market is the one that pays, for the reasons in platforms, rates, and finding your own students.
What none of this settles is which twenty things to teach first, and the honest answer comes from a different room entirely, where somebody has already worked out that a first vocabulary is made of the words an activity needs rather than the words a syllabus lists: what to start with, and in what order.