Give a placement test to ascertain the language level of your student. This test should include appropriate exercises that assess listening skills, reading skills, and writing skills. Although speaking skills are usually left out of placement tests, it is always helpful to ask a few "getting-to-know-you" questions while they are doing their test. Progress this conversation to a level where you can sense the limit of their ability.
Begin your elementary learner with lessons focusing on articles, sentence building, comparatives with adjectives, superlative adjectives, "can" for permission, present continuous and present tenses, present perfect question forms and past modals. Lessons concerning functional language items could include likes and dislikes, shopping for clothes, shopping for food and writing a letter to a pen pal. These are the building blocks that will allow you and your students to move up to higher levels.
Begin your pre-intermediate learner with lessons focusing on reported speech, past perfect tense, adjectives using "ing" and "ed", have to/ has to/ had to for obligation, question tags, comparatives, comparatives using adverbs and "how" questions. Use the resources at the bottom of this article to find activities and games to enhance your teaching.
Begin your intermediate learner with lessons focusing on consolidating the past and present tenses, past perfect tense, modals, all conditional tenses, relative clauses, describing stories, speculating about the past, present and future, accepting and refusing with reasons, "used to" for past habits, describing future plans and supporting opinions. Give your student plenty of opportunity to practice their use of English. If you have the opportunity, and your student is willing, try some real world tests of language.
Begin your advanced learner with lessons focusing on aspect, emphatic structures, substitution and ellipsis, complex sentences, understanding and describing unfamiliar topics, giving detailed background to narratives, self-expression, global issues, the natural world, literature and humor. Experiment heavily at this stage with all manner of topics and exercises.