When a child speaks fluently but can’t understand the textbook
At primary school you can hear where reading falters. At secondary school it’s assumed the pupil reads. And it stops being visible where they don’t understand the text.
📚 Over the summer holidays, the school gets a fresh coat of paint. The lino in the corridor is replaced, new desks arrive, an interactive whiteboard goes up on the wall and the head invites a photographer in for the autumn photos. The building comes out of August rested, smelling of paint and ready. Then the first day of term arrives, the children scatter to their classrooms and the teaching starts up exactly as it left off in June.
I’ve got nothing against the painting. It’s just that every time, I’m pulled up short by how precisely we tend to everything visible from the corridor, and how little attention we give to the one thing that happens inside every lesson and that nobody sees. And that thing is text.
When reading goes quiet at secondary school
At primary school, reading is an “audible” business. Children read aloud, one after another, and the teacher hears where they falter. Hears the hesitation before a longer word, hears that a sentence has been read without being understood, hears the child assembling individual letters one after another instead of reading them together. Reading is an acoustic matter, and a mistake in it can’t be hidden. Which is precisely why it can be worked with so well.
Then secondary school arrives and reading goes quiet. Pupils read the text to themselves, silently, because they can do it now, can’t they. The school takes this as progress, and in a certain sense it is. But at the same moment it switches off the only light by which it was possible to see when a text doesn’t land. And so from that point on, the child who understands looks exactly like the child who has merely run their eyes down the page.
The terminology nobody speaks at home
🧩 Now for the main point. There is one language of instruction that nobody speaks at home. Not in a Vietnamese family, not in a Czech one.
Try to recall the last dinner at home where somebody used the word line segment. Or vertebrate, subject of a sentence, industrial revolution, right-angled triangle, quantity, conifer. These words aren’t passed down within the family. You don’t pick them up from your siblings, you don’t hear them on the playground and you won’t find them in the videos children watch either.
They exist exclusively at school, in textbooks and in the wording of exam questions. The school is therefore both the only place where they are taught and the only place where they are tested.
Which means that academic language is a second language for every child. In a family that speaks Czech at home, nobody notices. Academic words sound like Czech, they’re written in the same alphabet, and the parent hears their child speaking fluently. So they think to themselves, what on earth could the child possibly be missing in a textbook. But knowing Czech and knowing academic terms are two different things. The first is audible straight away. The second only shows up when the child gets stuck over a textbook, because they don’t understand.
In the specialist literature, that difference is described as the difference between conversational fluency and academic language, and it was introduced by the Canadian linguist Jim Cummins. According to his findings, a child learning a second language reaches an ordinary conversational level within roughly two to three years, whereas catching up with their peers in academic language takes them five to seven years, sometimes longer.
The Czech methodology for working with pupils whose first language is different takes this over almost verbatim and adds a warning that every teacher ought to read: even a pupil who can already communicate well may not have acquired precisely this academic terminology. For a native speaker it’s a given, but for everyone else it’s an obstacle.
I could stop here, if somebody else were writing this article. But that account assumes a child who has only just arrived. The years are counted from arrival, and the clock is presumed to start running from the moment the family crossed the border of the country where they now live.
A large proportion of the children we’re talking about here, however, haven’t arrived from anywhere. They were born here, they went to Czech nursery, they’ve had Czech for as long as they can remember, and in speech you couldn’t tell them apart from their classmates. Cummins’s timeline doesn’t fit them at all. And the trouble with the textbook remains all the same.
Why? Because that timeline never actually measured language as such. It measured access to academic language. And that isn’t acquired through length of residence in a country, but through the amount of good-quality work with text at school.
Vietnamese at home and understanding the textbook
🔍 What naturally follows is the question parents ask us most often. Aren’t we making school harder for our children by speaking Vietnamese at home?
I understand where that question comes from. Vietnamese at home isn’t a leisure activity or a sentimental gesture. Without it, the child can’t talk to their grandmother, doesn’t follow what’s being said around the family table, and wouldn’t understand other members of the family either. It’s an operational necessity.
Translated into practice: reading technique migrates between languages, comprehension of text does not. And the older the child, the less transfers between languages.
For parents this means two things at once. The first is relief. Vietnamese at home isn’t the reason your child is struggling with the history textbook. You don’t need to restrict it, apologise for it or put it off until the holidays. The second is a demand. Academic language cannot under any circumstances be built at home. It has to arise in Czech, at school, in each subject separately. The family can’t supply it even if it wanted to, because it doesn’t use it itself.
Let me add one honest note. Cummins’s work has its critics too, and their objections aren’t trivial. They point out that the distinction between everyday and academic language created an artificial boundary, and that in practice it turned into deficit thinking — an attitude in which the child’s everyday language is seen as inferior and the child themselves as not yet ready to learn.
I’m putting that in here deliberately. The difference between speaking and reading is a description of a situation, not a diagnosis of a child. The moment it becomes a label, it stops helping and starts doing harm.
Why the school doesn’t notice in time
🪟 What remains is to explain why the school doesn’t notice sooner. The first reason is psychological and it concerns all of us. A fluent speaker looks like a finished job. When a child answers in a full sentence, laughs at a joke and copes with what’s asked of them in the lesson, the adult brain closes the case. Historically, the entire concept of academic language arose from precisely this mistake.
Teachers and psychologists alike assumed that a child who speaks fluently no longer has any language barrier, and yet the same children repeatedly failed at academic tasks. It took years before it occurred to anyone that fluency and academic language are two different things, learned over different lengths of time.
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A similar warning is heard in the Czech debate too. The educationalist Tran Thu Tra points out that it’s wrong to assume that when children whose first language is different speak Czech very well, they automatically know the Czech cultural context as well. In the same interview she talks about the stereotyping of Vietnamese children as hard-working and studious.
This stereotype functions as a second layer of camouflage. A child assumed to be diligent gets less attention, not more. When something doesn’t go well for them, it’s explained away as tiredness or inattention, because language has already been ticked off.
The second reason is structural and far more prosaic. At primary school a class has one teacher, who knows the whole class and sees them across every subject. At secondary school, text becomes a working tool in every lesson at once. The wording of a maths problem is text. The paragraph on the human circulatory system is text. The caption on a map is text.
But nobody in particular is responsible for working with text. The Czech teacher handles literature and spelling, the history teacher covers history and the maths teacher has troubles of their own. Understanding academic text is therefore simultaneously a prerequisite of every subject and the subject of none.
And so it happens that a child fails a maths test because of the words rather than the numbers, and in the comments, as a teacher’s alibi, it says they weren’t paying attention.
The hardest sentence of the school year
🧭 There is only one moment when the whole thing comes out. It comes when a pupil says they don’t understand the question.
It looks like a trifle, and yet it’s the hardest sentence of the school year. Admitting in front of twenty people in a classroom that they got it and I didn’t takes a fair amount of courage, even in an adult. A child will summon that courage only where it’s safe — that is, in a class where nobody laughs at them, where the teacher doesn’t respond to such a question with a sigh, and where somebody before them has already dared to do it and nothing happened to them.
This isn’t a soft add-on to teaching. A secondary analysis of data from the international PISA survey, carried out by the Czech School Inspectorate, lists a good school climate, support for pupils’ self-confidence and positive relationships between teachers and pupils among the key factors influencing results.
Classroom climate is a diagnostic instrument. Without it, the teacher simply won’t find out what went unread in the lesson. And it’s set in the first days of the school year, not halfway through. A parent can’t see into the lesson and can’t change the climate in the classroom. But there are two things they can do that nobody can take away from them.
The first takes five minutes a week. At home, take any textbook you like, science or history, open it at the page your child is currently working on, and ask them to retell one paragraph in their own words. Not read it. Retell it.
The difference between a child who understands the text and a child who can play the text back out loud shows up within a minute and is perfectly distinct. When the retelling stalls, ask which specific word in that sentence is the one they can’t make sense of.
It’s almost always there, and it’s almost always a term nobody has ever used at home. This isn’t a test and it has nothing to do with marks. It’s the only way for you to see what nobody at school hears.
The second fits into a single sentence at parents’ evening. Ask the teacher how they work with textbook text in their subject. Not whether they work with it — that’s a question answered yes automatically. But how they work with it. The answer will tell you more about the quality of that lesson than a list of the school’s equipment.
A great deal gets repaired at school over the summer holidays. Lights, doors, desks, paintwork. But the thing that decides whether your child will understand the paragraph on the circulatory system doesn’t get repaired over the holidays and can’t be bought out of the budget.
It arises in lessons, one explained sentence at a time, and it begins with somebody in the classroom putting their hand up and simply saying, quite normally, that they don’t understand and asking for help.
It’s worth that brave person being your child.
🎓 You can find the original version of this article on the blog Olymp: Chytré vzdělávání & Giáo dục Thông minh.
Sources used
- BICS and CALP: Empirical and Theoretical Status of the Distinction (Springer, Encyclopedia of Language and Education) — Jim Cummins’s chapter describing the distinction between conversational fluency and academic language, how it came about, and the timescales for acquiring each of the two levels.
- Příručka pro vzdělávání žáků s odlišným mateřským jazykem (Gymnázium Jana Nerudy) — A Czech methodological handbook setting out how long it takes pupils learning Czech as a second language to manage conversation and how long to manage academic language, including a warning about terminology.
- Cross-linguistic transfer of oral language, decoding, phonological awareness and reading comprehension: a meta-analysis of the correlational evidence (Journal of Research in Reading) — A meta-analysis of correlational data on the transfer of reading skills between a first and second language, distinguishing the strength of transfer for decoding, oral language and reading comprehension.
- Linguistic diversity, schooling, and social class (MacSwan and Rolstad) — A critical text objecting that the distinction between everyday and academic language creates an artificial boundary and encourages a deficit view of linguistic minorities.
- Školní poradenství v praxi: Nevymýšlejte vietnamským dětem česká jména, říká pedagožka z vietnamské rodiny (EDUin) — An interview with the educationalist Tran Thu Tra about the assumptions teachers make regarding children whose first language is different, and about the stereotyping of Vietnamese children.
- Sekundární analýza mezinárodního šetření PISA 2022 (Czech School Inspectorate, edu.gov.cz) — An analysis of Czech data from the PISA survey, devoted among other things to school climate, relationships between teachers and pupils, and how these connect to results.
- Matematika? Ne, test z češtiny. (Olymp School, Seznam Médium) — A piece on how a maths test ends up measuring comprehension of the wording in Czech.
- Mami, jasně, že tomu rozumím (Olymp School, Seznam Médium) — An article on the difference between a child claiming to understand the material and actually understanding it.
- Číst se dá očima i ušima (Olymp School, Seznam Médium) — A text on reading by ear and on how a text can be approached by a route other than the eyes.
