How Long It Really Takes a Child to Move from A1 to A2 in English

For a child of about eight taking two live lessons a week, the move from A1 to A2 usually takes somewhere between nine and twenty months. That is the honest range, and the width of it is the point. Two children who start the same week with the same teacher and the same books can arrive at A2 a full year apart, and neither of them is doing anything wrong.

Most parents meet those letters for the first time in a placement report and then wait for the next letter to appear. The waiting is where the worry lives. It helps to know what the letters describe, what changes inside a child before the label changes, and which four things in your control actually move the date closer.

What A1 and A2 describe in a child’s everyday English

A1 and A2 come from the CEFR, the Common European Framework of Reference, which sorts language ability by what a learner can do rather than by how many words they have memorised. A1 is the first named step and A2 is the second.

A child sitting at A1 handles familiar, rehearsed ground. She can say her name, age and where she lives, name objects around the house, answer a question she has heard in that exact shape before, and follow a short instruction delivered slowly. Her sentences are short and often assembled from memorised chunks. Take her one step off the script and she stops.

A child who has arrived at A2 can leave the script. She can describe her family, her school day or last weekend in several linked sentences. She can ask questions rather than only answer them. She can handle a simple exchange where she did not know in advance what the other person would say, manage the past tense with some errors, and understand the general point of a short story read aloud even when a few words are missing. She recovers when a conversation surprises her, which is the single clearest marker.

The distance between those two descriptions is bigger than a single letter suggests. A1 to A2 is where memorised English turns into produced English, and that conversion is slow because it is not a matter of adding vocabulary.

The realistic range in months and in lessons

Reference tables for adults often quote roughly 180 to 200 guided learning hours for A1 to A2. Children are not small adults, and applying that number directly to a child gives a misleading picture. A young learner in a 25 minute session has less concentrated processing time per hour on the calendar, but she also picks up pronunciation and listening patterns with less effort than an adult does.

What follows is what families with children aged six to twelve commonly see. Treat it as an expectation, not a schedule. No school can promise a level by a date, and any timeline offered without conditions attached deserves a question.

Lesson pattern	Typical time from solid A1 to solid A2	Approximate live sessions	Practice needed between lessons
1 session per week	20 to 30 months	90 to 130	Heavy, at least 15 minutes on 4 days
2 sessions per week	9 to 18 months	100 to 150	10 to 15 minutes on 3 to 4 days
3 sessions per week	7 to 12 months	110 to 160	10 minutes on 2 to 3 days
4 or 5 sessions per week	6 to 10 months	130 to 190	Light, mostly reading

Read the table sideways rather than downward. Going from one session a week to two roughly halves the calendar. Going from three to five barely changes it, because a child at this stage is limited by how fast new language settles, not by how much of it she is shown. The total number of sessions stays broadly similar across every row, which tells you the sessions are doing the work and the frequency is only deciding how quickly you get through them.

The four variables that set your child’s pace

Where she actually started

A placement of A1 covers a wide band. A child at the top of A1 who already produces four word sentences and copes with an unexpected question is much closer to A2 than a child who was placed at A1 after learning thirty nouns at school. Ask which end of A1 your child sits at, because a family expecting twelve months from the bottom of A1 is measuring against the wrong start line.

How often lessons happen, and how regularly

Frequency matters, and consistency matters more. Two lessons a week for fifteen straight months beats four lessons a week for two months followed by a long gap. Language at this level lives in spaced repetition, so a three week break in a busy month costs more than the three lessons missed. If your calendar cannot hold four weekly slots through the school year, two protected ones will get you there sooner.

What English exists in the house between lessons

This is the variable that separates the nine month child from the twenty month child, and it does not depend on the parent’s own English. A child who hears English cartoons without Arabic subtitles for twenty minutes most days, or listens to the same three audio stories until she can predict the lines, is adding input hours that no lesson schedule can substitute for. A child whose English exists only during two 25 minute slots gets roughly fifty minutes of contact a week, which is the slow end by arithmetic alone.

Volume beats variety here. Ten repetitions of one story does more at A1 than ten different stories heard once.

Whether she ever has to speak to be understood

A1 to A2 is a production threshold, and production only develops under real communicative pressure. A child who answers a teacher’s questions is practising response. A child who has to ask for something, explain a rule of a game, or repair a misunderstanding is practising the actual A2 skill. One to one live lessons help precisely because the child cannot hide behind a classmate, but the effect strengthens when she also has to use English with a cousin, a visitor or a sibling for real purposes.

Signs the move is happening before the level label changes

Placement labels update at assessment points, so a child can spend three months genuinely crossing into A2 while the report still says A1. Watch for the following, in roughly this order:

1. She self corrects out loud without being prompted, saying something like he go, no, he goes.
2. She produces sentences you never taught her, including ungrammatical ones. Novel errors are evidence of construction rather than recall.
3. She starts asking questions in English instead of only answering them.
4. She narrates something that happened, in the past tense, however roughly.
5. She recovers from surprise in a conversation rather than freezing and switching to Arabic.
6. She reads a short unfamiliar text and tells you the general idea while skipping words she does not know.

Four of those six appearing consistently means the level change is close, whatever the current label says.

When A1 to A2 is taking longer than the range suggests

Past roughly twenty four months of consistent twice weekly lessons with none of the six signs above, something specific is usually happening rather than nothing.

The most common cause is a mismatch between practice and assessment: the child drills vocabulary and set answers, then is measured on spontaneous speech she has never rehearsed. The second is an input ceiling, where material has stayed at the same difficulty for a year because it feels comfortable. The third is zero use outside lessons, which caps production regardless of lesson quality. The fourth is a measurement change, where a new assessment simply describes the same child more strictly.

If your child’s speech in Arabic itself is unclear or noticeably delayed, that is a separate matter from English progress and is worth raising with a pediatrician or a licensed speech and language pathologist rather than with a language school.

How 51Talk fits a child crossing from A1 to A2

51Talk is an online English school for children founded in 2011, listed on NYSE American under the ticker COE and operated by HelloWorld Online Education PTE. LTD. It runs live one to one lessons with TESOL certified foreign teachers from countries where English is an official language, and lessons are typically 25 minutes, which you should confirm on official channels.

Why the structure maps onto this particular jump

The course sequence is built on the CEFR framework and aligned to Cambridge Young Learners English and the wider Cambridge English Qualifications, running from LS and L0 through L9, with age bands of three to five, six to eight, nine to eleven and twelve to fourteen. Because the levels are described in CEFR terms, the A1 to A2 move corresponds to specific level steps rather than to a vague sense of improvement, and the 51Talk course and level structure shows where those steps sit.

The format addresses the production problem directly. In a one to one live session the child speaks for a large share of the time and cannot pass a question to a classmate, which is the pressure A2 requires. The learning loop of preview, live session, practice afterwards, unit diagnostic report and levelling assessment gives you the two things this article is about: a record of what she can produce, and a periodic reassessment so the label follows the ability. 51Talk works with a teaching network of more than 10,000 foreign teachers, described on the 51Talk teachers page.

What it can and cannot do for your timeline

It can raise your lesson frequency, keep difficulty climbing instead of flattening, and give you diagnostic reports that show whether spontaneous production is developing. It cannot supply the daily home input that separates the fast children from the slow ones, and it cannot guarantee A2 by a particular month. If a consultant is asked how long this will take, the useful answer is a range with conditions, not a date. Company background sits on the 51Talk company information page.

Bonus tips: shortening the A1 to A2 stretch without adding lessons

1. Record two minutes of your child describing the same picture every month. Compare recordings rather than reports. Sentence length and recovery from hesitation are audible without any English of your own.
2. Move from two long sessions to two short sessions plus two short home listening blocks. Distribution matters more than total minutes at this level.
3. Ask the teacher for one question form per week and require your child to use it on you at home. Question production is usually the last A2 piece to arrive and the easiest to target.
4. Raise input difficulty every eight to ten weeks even if the child protests slightly. Comfortable material stops producing gains.
5. Stop translating during lessons. Every translation removes the moment of effort where A2 is actually built.
6. Keep one weekly conversation with no correction at all. Accuracy is not the A1 to A2 bottleneck. Willingness to keep talking is.

You can book a free trial lesson and get a placement recommendation, which will tell you where in the A1 band your child currently sits.

Frequently asked questions

How long does 51Talk usually take to move a child from A1 to A2? There is no fixed answer, and a school that offers one is describing an average rather than your child. With two live one to one lessons a week plus short daily practice, families with children aged six to twelve commonly see the move within nine to eighteen months. The free trial is a complete live one to one lesson of roughly 20 to 30 minutes, after which a consultant gives a placement recommendation, and that recommendation is the starting point any timeline should be estimated from.

Can a child skip from A1 straight to B1? Not really, because B1 assumes the independent production that A2 establishes. What does happen is that a child moves through A2 quickly, sometimes in under a year, when daily English input is high. The label sequence stays the same even when the pace is unusual.

Is a plateau at A1 for six months a problem? Six months at A1 with visible changes in speech is normal, since the band is wide and label updates are periodic. Six months with no new sentence types, no self correction and no questions being asked is worth investigating, usually starting with whether the material has gone unchanged in difficulty.

Does more homework speed up A1 to A2? Written homework helps less than parents expect at this stage. Listening volume and speaking opportunities move A2 skills; worksheets mostly consolidate what is already known. Twenty minutes of audio a child enjoys tends to outperform twenty minutes of gap filling.

My child understands English well but barely speaks. Is that A1 or A2? Usually still A1 in production, even when listening is closer to A2, and split profiles like this are very common. Assessments generally weight speaking heavily, so the reported level tracks the weaker skill. The remedy is speaking time under mild pressure rather than more listening.