Academic Language: Why Textbook English Needs to Be Taught, Not Assumed

By Dr Vijaya Prasad, Educational Linguist and Academic Language Researcher

Key facts

• The language of textbooks and examinations differs from everyday spoken language in every Indian language, not just in English-medium schools.
• Research on academic language development finds that this gap can, and should, be explicitly taught rather than left for students to absorb on their own.
• NEP 2020, NCF 2023, and the NIPUN Bharat foundational literacy mission all point toward explicit language instruction as part of every subject, not just the language classroom.
• Free classroom resources: NIPUN Bharat FLN assessment tools (through your SCERT or DIET), NCERT teacher guides, Azim Premji Foundation’s open-access research, and DIKSHA platform content in 36 languages.
• Support for teachers: KIRAN mental health helpline (1800-599-0019), Tele-MANAS (14416), CHILDLINE (1098).

The language of textbooks and examinations is different from everyday spoken language in every Indian language. A student can be fully fluent in conversation and still struggle to parse a textbook sentence built from nominalisations, passive constructions, and subject-specific terms that never come up at home or on the playground. Research on academic language development shows this gap is not a fluency problem in disguise. It is a distinct skill, and it can and should be taught explicitly.

What the research actually says

Indian teachers already sense that the research on academic language is more specific and more useful than most professional development programmes suggest; it just rarely gets said aloud in a staffroom. The evidence here draws on ASER survey data, Azim Premji Foundation field studies, NCERT curriculum research, government programme evaluations, and peer-reviewed work conducted in government secondary schools. Where international evidence is used elsewhere in this field, it needs to be flagged explicitly and checked against Indian classroom conditions before it is applied here.

This is not an essay about education in Singapore or Finland, translated awkwardly into an Indian setting. It is written specifically for secondary teachers, because the specific demand of a Class IX or X textbook, dense subject terminology layered onto exam-register sentence structure, is different from the general challenges of teaching younger children.

A teacher who genuinely cares can still make a problem worse by misunderstanding its mechanism. Understanding the mechanism is what turns sincere care into effective care.

Good intentions are not sufficient on their own. A teacher who tells a struggling student to “just read the chapter again,” out of a genuine wish to help her catch up, is treating an academic-language gap as if it were a comprehension-effort problem rather than a vocabulary-and-structure problem the student has never been taught to decode. Rereading a sentence built from unfamiliar academic constructions does not teach those constructions. The gap between wanting to help and understanding what academic language actually requires is where the practical work below sits.

Five principles for applying this in your classroom

Five principles recur across the research on academic language in Indian classrooms, and they hold up across subjects and grade levels.

1. Diagnose before you prescribe. The most common reason a well-designed intervention fails is that it treats a general problem without identifying its specific form. A student who struggles with a science textbook because she doesn’t know the subject-specific terms needs a different response than a student who knows the terms but cannot parse the passive, multi-clause sentences the textbook is written in. Naming which one you are looking at comes before choosing what to do about it.

2. Build the relationship before you build the instruction. Across reading development, behaviour management, and academic achievement, the quality of the teacher-student relationship is consistently reported as a major factor in how well any given strategy performs. A student is far more likely to admit she doesn’t understand a textbook sentence, rather than silently copying it, in a classroom where asking that question feels safe.

3. Trust evidence over intuition, especially your own. Teachers develop strong, often accurate instincts about their students. But those instincts run into predictable blind spots: assuming that a student who speaks confidently in conversation can automatically read the textbook at the same level, underestimating how much individual variation in exposure to academic English or the state medium sits inside one classroom, and mistaking a correctly copied answer for genuine understanding of the sentence it came from. A short check, asking a student to explain a textbook sentence in her own words, corrects these blind spots faster than a semester of assuming.

4. Treat the community as a resource, not a constraint. Indian secondary schools often position the teacher as the sole resource and everything else, family, community, peer explanation, as an obstacle to work around. Flip that: the teacher is the person coordinating a network that already includes the peer who can explain a textbook passage in simpler terms, the subject teacher in another department who has taught the same academic structures, and the Block Resource Coordinator whose job is exactly this kind of question.

5. Design for sustainable practice. An intervention that only works because a teacher gives up her lunch break, her weekend, or her health to rewrite every textbook passage in simplified language is not a sustainable intervention. It is debt against next term. Whatever you take from this piece, a habit of naming and explaining one academic sentence structure per lesson, should be small enough to still be running in March.

Where this fits Indian education policy

NEP 2020, NCF 2023, and the NIPUN Bharat mission all point in the direction this research supports: language instruction woven into every subject, not confined to the language period, so that academic language is taught rather than assumed. The gap between that policy direction and what actually happens on a Tuesday morning in a Class IX science or social studies lesson is the space this piece is trying to close. It is not an argument for a new policy. It is guidance for the teacher who is already in the room, with the textbook open, deciding how to explain the next dense paragraph.

Frequently asked questions

If a student speaks the language fluently, why would she struggle with the textbook in that same language? Spoken fluency and academic language are different skills. Everyday conversation relies on short sentences, familiar vocabulary, and shared context. Textbook and exam language relies on dense noun phrases, passive constructions, and subject-specific terms that rarely appear outside school, so fluency in one does not automatically transfer to the other.

Is this only a problem for students in a second or third language? No. The gap between spoken and academic register exists within every Indian language, including a student’s mother tongue. A student studying in her home language can still find her science or civics textbook unfamiliar in structure and vocabulary compared to how she and her family actually talk.

What does “explicitly teaching” academic language look like in practice? It means naming the pattern, not just the content: pointing out that a sentence uses the passive voice and why, breaking down a subject-specific term into its parts, or rewriting one dense sentence together as a class before moving on. The goal is for the structure to become recognisable, not just the individual passage.

Where can a teacher find state-specific material on this? Start with your SCERT or DIET for NIPUN Bharat FLN assessment tools, NCERT’s teacher guides, Azim Premji Foundation’s open-access publications, and DIKSHA, which carries content in 36 languages. If nothing exists for your specific state and grade, that gap is itself worth reporting to your Block Resource Coordinator.

What to do:

• Name one child in your class who is most affected by the academic language gap, and write down one specific thing you will try differently for that child this week. Not a general improvement: a named action for a named child.
• Search DIKSHA or ask your Block Resource Coordinator for any resource specific to this topic in your state’s context. If nothing exists, note that and report it. The gap in resources is itself useful information.
• Spend five minutes this week just observing one aspect of your classroom related to this, not teaching, just watching and noting. What you notice while only watching is different from what you notice while teaching.
• Tell one colleague one specific finding from this piece this week. Explaining it will sharpen your own understanding, and it may start a conversation that helps more than any single action.
• At the end of the week, ask yourself what you will do differently next week because of this, and what you will look for to know whether it worked.

Support resources for teachers: NIPUN Bharat FLN assessment tools (via your SCERT or DIET), NCERT teacher guides, Azim Premji Foundation open-access research, DIKSHA (36 languages), KIRAN mental health helpline (1800-599-0019), Tele-MANAS (14416), CHILDLINE (1098).