Private tutoring is important for quite a lot of secondary school pupils in Austria. Usually these private lessons are met with great expectations on the part of the pupils and their parents. The article presents a pilot study on the interaction of pupils and their tutors (university students to become teachers) in private lessons. The main focus of the paper is the qualitative analysis of the tutors ́ qualification in responding to pupils ́ statements, actions and underlying conceptions. It shows that tutors tend to take on a question or misunderstanding of the pupil, which is usually not very well formulated, elaborate on this utterance on a mainly syntactic level and in doing so miss out on the opportunity for initializing a learning process that leads to deeper understanding.