Fluent in conversation, struggling in class: the two languages of school

School runs on two kinds of language, and children pick them up at very different speeds. The first is the language of the corridor and the football pitch: face to face, supported by gesture, tone and a shared situation. The second is the language of the textbook, the exam paper and the essay: abstract, written down, stripped of those clues.

The distinction was set out by the Canadian researcher Jim Cummins, who called the first BICS (basic interpersonal communicative skills) and the second CALP (cognitive academic language proficiency). NALDIC, the UK subject association for English as an additional language, describes BICS as “the social language skills which is often highly contextualised whether in the classroom, playground or street,” and CALP as “the more de-contextualised, abstract language use increasingly required for the school curriculum.”

A child can be at the top of the first scale and near the bottom of the second at the same time. That is not a contradiction and it is not laziness. It is the normal shape of second-language development, and it catches out families who reasonably assumed that “she speaks English now” meant the problem was solved.

If your child cannot yet follow lessons at all, that is a different situation with different answers — see our guide to starting a local school without the language. This article is about the child who sounds fine and still cannot write the essay.

How long academic English takes, and what progress looks like

The most quoted study is by Kenji Hakuta, Yuko Goto Butler and Daria Witt, published in 2000 by the University of California Linguistic Minority Research Institute. Across four school districts, two in California and two in Canada, they concluded that oral proficiency takes three to five years to develop, and academic English proficiency can take four to seven years. Policies assuming one year of support is enough, they added, are “wildly unrealistic.”

A more recent study gives a sense of the spread. Steve Strand and Ariel Lindorff of the University of Oxford, in a 2020 report for the Bell Foundation, tracked 5,453 pupils in Wales who started school as English learners. By the end of their sixth year of primary school, 96% had reached the “Early Acquisition” band and 78% “Developing Competence” — but only 31% were rated Competent or Fluent. Among those who did get there, it took 4.6 years on average.

That last row matters. In the Oxford study, EAL pupils rated Competent or Fluent outperformed native English and Welsh speakers at every stage measured. The gap is real, but it closes.

Term by term, progress looks like subject words used correctly, longer and better-controlled written sentences, and less scaffolding needed to start a piece of writing. The NSW Department of Education’s EAL/D progression describes four phases — Beginning, Emerging, Developing, Consolidating — and notes that even at Consolidating, when a student has “a sound knowledge of Standard Australian English”, they “still require focused language teaching.”

Why it gets missed, and why support often stops too soon

The Australian Curriculum’s EAL/D Teacher Resource names the problem exactly: “Some EAL/D students will appear to have good interpersonal communication skills; however, as academic language demands increase in the curriculum, gaps in their English language skills will appear.” NALDIC makes the same point from the teacher’s side: “Once pupils learning EAL have acquired a very basic communicative competence, it is easy to assume that their understanding of English and engagement in learning is much greater than it actually is.”

ACARA adds a useful line for your child’s record: EAL/D students who do not meet age-related benchmarks “are not necessarily ‘underperforming’, but rather they are achieving at levels commensurate with their phase of English language learning.” Worth quoting in a meeting.

What academic language actually demands

It helps to be concrete here, because “she needs to improve her English” is too vague to act on.

Subject vocabulary. Averil Coxhead’s Academic Word List, developed at Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington, contains 570 word families and deliberately excludes the 2,000 most frequent words of English: a whole layer of words a child almost never meets in conversation. The Education Endowment Foundation’s 2019 guidance separates general academic words (“examine”) from subject-specific ones (“photosynthesis”) and recommends explicit teaching of both in every subject.

Dense noun phrases. Fang, Schleppegrell and Cox, in the Journal of Literacy Research (2006), found that “the language through which academic subjects are presented is markedly different from the social language that students use in everyday ordinary life,” largely because academic texts pack information into nouns. “The rapid cooling of the surface layer” is one noun phrase carrying a whole process.

Passive voice and instruction grammar. ACARA gives a sharp example from maths: “if 8 is subtracted from 10” means 10 − 8, not 8 − 10. Get the grammar wrong and you get the sum wrong, no matter how well you understand subtraction.

Text shapes. WIDA, the US language-development consortium, describes four “Key Uses” of academic language: recount, explain, argue and discuss. A child who argues brilliantly out loud may never have been taught what an argument looks like on paper.

Command words. Exam boards define these precisely. In Cambridge International’s AS & A Level Geography syllabus, describe means “state in words the key characteristics and give factual details,” explain means “set out reasons, causes or purposes,” and evaluate means “make a judgement from available evidence” (Cambridge’s own spelling). A student who describes when asked to evaluate loses marks for a language reason, not a knowledge one.

The same gap exists in your home language

Parents often notice the mirror image: a child chatty in English but vague in the home language — able to talk about dinner, unable to discuss a news article. A child who left first-language schooling at seven has roughly a seven-year-old’s academic vocabulary in it, however fluent their speech sounds.

This matters practically. The International Dyslexia Association points out that the key to an accurate diagnosis for an English learner is checking whether the difficulty “exists in both the native and second language.” You cannot make that comparison if the home language has quietly faded.

Keeping the home language strong also appears to help English rather than hinder it. Australia’s Raising Children Network, a government-funded parenting service, states that children exposed to a heritage language “do better at learning English at school if they keep using their heritage languages at home,” because “a solid base in their first language makes it easier for them to learn a second one.”

Language lag, dyslexia, or ADHD?

This is the question most parents arrive at, and it cannot be answered from a report card. The patterns overlap, and only a proper assessment can separate them — but there are signposts worth noticing.

The clearest is whether the difficulty shows up in both languages. The International Dyslexia Association warns about errors in both directions: schools may miss dyslexia by “attributing any English reading and writing difficulties to their status as English learners,” while children with limited English exposure may be wrongly labeled dyslexic when they simply need more instruction. It recommends looking at core indicators — phonological awareness, decoding, fluency and spelling — alongside years of schooling in each language and any family history.

The NHS lists signs of dyslexia in school-age children including reading below the expected level, being slow and hesitant when reading aloud, messy written work with many spelling mistakes, and difficulty planning and organising schoolwork. The CDC’s list for ADHD is different in character: daydreaming, losing things, fidgeting, talking too much, careless mistakes, difficulty taking turns — and, importantly, difficulties that show up “at school, at home, or with friends” rather than only in written English.

If the right-hand column keeps describing your child, ask the school about an assessment rather than waiting another year. We set out how that works for families living abroad in our guide to ADHD and autism assessment as an expat family and in our guide to dyslexia assessment and support abroad. Two things can also be true at once: a child can be an English learner and dyslexic, and needs support for both.

What good EAL support looks like, and what to ask

International schools vary enormously, from a specialist department with qualified staff to one part-time teacher shared across the school. The questions below reveal which kind you are dealing with. Ask them in writing, so you have the answers on record.

Frameworks such as WIDA’s six proficiency levels, from Entering to Reaching, exist precisely so that language progress can be tracked separately from subject grades. If the school cannot tell you where your child sits on any language scale, that is useful information in itself.

On methods, a 2021 systematic review by Oxley and de Cat in the Language Learning Journal, covering 26 studies, found that explicit vocabulary instruction and targeted oral language practice produced gains, with the strongest effects for learners starting furthest behind. Shared reading helped when combined with pre-taught vocabulary, embedded definitions or follow-up activities — not on its own.

What helps at home, and what does not

You are not expected to be a language teacher. The most useful things you can do at home are about exposure to written language and talking about it.

One more thing worth saying out loud to your child: being told your English is excellent and then getting a low grade is confusing. Naming the two-languages idea often comes as a relief, because it explains the mismatch without making it a verdict on how clever they are.

Stay, change school, or try a small online class

Most children in this position do best where they are, with better-targeted support. But if the school has no real EAL provision, or refuses to look again after exiting your child, the setting itself is part of the question. Before moving, read what a mid-year school change actually involves. Here is how the three routes compare.

Class size is the variable that matters most for language. A child who says three sentences a day in a class of 28 gets little practice at using academic language out loud, which is the step before writing it — online or in a building.

One option built around small groups: NIJIN GLOBAL ACADEMY

NIJIN GLOBAL ACADEMY (NGA) is an online international school for ages 6–18, run by NIJIN, the company behind this site. We mention it because two parts of its design relate directly to the problem in this article: very small classes, and no English requirement to join. It will not suit every family, and the limitations below matter as much as the features.

NGA’s FAQ also says classes run in an environment outsiders cannot freely enter, that mentors watch over online interactions, and that families both abroad and in Japan can join.

Frequently asked questions

Sources used for this article

More talking time, in a class of eight

If your child needs more chances to use academic language out loud, class size is the first thing to look at. NIJIN GLOBAL ACADEMY is an online international school with classes of eight and bilingual mentors, opening in September 2027. Tuition has not yet been announced.

Visit NIJIN GLOBAL ACADEMY