English Reading: Building Literacy in India’s Public Schools

This blog breaks down why English Reading remains a critical gap in India’s public schools, and what that means for equity and learning outcomes. The blog details a clear, classroom-relevant approach to teaching reading (decoding + meaning), especially for children with limited English exposure.

English Reading is an essential skill, it is the gateway to knowledge, thinking, growth, and power in this world. It is an indispensable foundational skill. In an increasingly complex world and especially with the advent of artificial intelligence, reading has become a prerequisite for meaningfully leveraging new technologies. When foundational skills are weak, technological advances risk widening existing inequities rather than narrowing them. For this reason, foundational literacy has never been more important.

Recognizing this urgency, India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 places a strong emphasis on Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN). This prioritization attempts to address one of the most persistent challenges in Indian education: stagnating and staggeringly low learning levels. Recent data from the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) shows that although there have been some improvements in basic reading skills in early grades, a large proportion of children still struggle to read at grade level, even after several years of schooling. For example, only around 23.4 % of Class 3 students in government schools could read a Class 2-level text in 2024, up from 16.3 % in 2022, but still a small minority overall.

Yet teaching English reading is no simple task.

The Global Debate on How Children Learn to Read

There is extensive and polarized research on how children learn to read. For decades, researchers and educators have occupied different camps that can be broadly divided into the whole-word approach versus the science of reading (phonics). Despite these approaches being positioned at either end of a spectrum, both bodies of research offer some valuable insights. The ideas that multiple claims can hold truth simultaneously, that every study requires critical examination, and that context—whether the stage of reading or the population—acts as a catalyst, are the frames we must adopt when navigating reading research. This idea is echoed in Jeanne Chall’s stages of reading development, which show that the effectiveness of instructional approaches depends on the stage a child is in. As children progress through different phases of reading, they require different kinds of support and teaching must adapt accordingly.

Some children may benefit from whole-word strategies at certain stages of reading; others may respond better to explicit phonics instruction. In some cases, both methods fall short unless adapted to the learner’s context.

However, when we shift our focus to India, the problem becomes even more complex.

English Reading: Why the Indian Context Is Different

In India, most children learning to read in English are English language learners. For children in rural areas and within the public education system, the challenges multiply further. Many students encounter English primarily—or only—inside classrooms, with minimal exposure outside school.

Further, the children served by government schools in India often lack time, consistency, resources, and stability due to poverty-related constraints. This lack of supportive conditions that foster reading development within students, compounded by socioeconomic disadvantage, leads to a cumulative learning gap that widens as children advance through grades.

Despite these challenges, our children can become fluent readers. As Catherine Snow, an expert in language and literacy notes, “Many things contribute to reading without being prerequisites to reading.” Exposure to print-rich environments, fluent oral language, and supportive literacy practices at home can greatly enhance reading development. Such incidental exposure, more likely to be found in resource-rich and privileged communities, sets children on path to becoming fluent readers. As much as these conditions are crucial to learning, children can learn to read despite their absence. The question is then: What should instruction look like, especially for students who lack these enabling conditions? (Snow, Burns & Griffin, 1998).

To truly contextualize learning, two elements are essential: first, understanding how knowledge is organized within a discipline –in this case, how the English language has developed and the system that underpins it and second, understanding the learner.

Understanding the English Language System

To design effective literacy instruction, we must begin by understanding how the English language system itself works. Reading, at its core, is the ability to decode print and derive meaning from it, so reading = decoding English spelling × listening comprehension. However, English spelling is far less transparent than languages like Italian or even Hindi (largely). As English is not a strictly phonetic language, readers cannot always decode words by simply blending letter sounds. A word like enough, for instance, cannot be reliably read using basic sound–letter rules.

This opacity makes early reading more difficult, at least until decoding becomes automatic. Cognitive scientist Stanislas Dehaene argues that if learners had to master a highly transparent spelling system such as Italian rather than English, global literacy rates would likely be much higher, simply because such writing systems by design are more accessible to our brain (Dehaene, 2009).

Yet, despite its reputation, English orthography (spelling system) is deeply logical. The spelling system evolved primarily to preserve meaning rather than sound. For example, consider the words two, twelve, and twenty. All three share a historical meaning connection rooted in the word “two”
Yet their pronunciations differ significantly—two drops the /w/ sound, while twelve and twenty keep it in varied forms. If spelling followed sound alone, two might be written as “too” or “tu,” breaking its visible link with twelve and twenty. By preserving the spelling tw-, English helps readers recognize the shared meaning across these related words.

When we encounter a word, our brains rely heavily on semantic (meaning) pathways and English spellings often remain consistent across words that share meaning, even when their pronunciations deviate. Morphology (word structure) and etymology (history of the word), rather than phonics alone, reveal the logic behind these spellings (Bowers & Kirby,2010).

For example, the link between sign and signal would be lost if sign were spelled purely phonetically as “sine.” Similarly, many unfamiliar words become easier to interpret in print because their spellings mirror the structures of related words with similar meanings—e.g., science → scientific, compose → composition, muscle → muscular, autumn → autumnal, and bomb → bombard (Reading Rockets, n.d.).

Maintaining spelling supports meaning connection, which in turn makes vocabulary learning more efficient. This is aligned with the main purpose of the writing system which is to convey meaning as efficiently as possible.

Thus, while English spelling can sometimes feel irregular or frustrating, it is in fact logical, learnable, and essential for both reading and writing. Most importantly, it makes sense when understood through the combined lens of phonology, morphology, and etymology, rather than phonics alone.

Implications for Teaching English Reading

Despite these inherent challenges, children can learn to read when reading is taught in a clear, explicit, and systematic manner (Bowers,2020). In this context, systematic refers to teaching the English spelling system alongside phonemic awareness, with a deliberate focus on meaning to support orthographic mapping until spelling patterns become internalized. Even less common spelling patterns can be taught effectively when learners understand the meanings of words and their morphological components (Templeton, n.d.).

This approach to teach reading becomes especially critical for students who do not encounter English widely outside school. For these learners, reading cannot rely on incidental exposure; they need a structured, consistent, and dependable pathway to decode, practice, and apply their knowledge.

Teaching Beyond the Early Grades

Another key consideration while teaching reading is that, Globally and in India, policymakers emphasize that children should learn to decode by Grade 3, as this is when education transitions from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” However, explicit instruction should not end once children achieve fluency with certain texts. As students encounter increasingly complex texts with less frequent and more academic vocabulary, decoding instruction must continue, especially in contexts where foundational skills remain fragile. Learning to read and reading to learn happens simultaneously, though the balance shifts to the latter as children move up grades. Therefore, teachers should not abandon explicit instruction in decoding; rather, they should sustain it throughout schooling. With each grade, the focus gradually shifts toward comprehension, critical thinking, and application. (Chall,1983 ; ASCD,2023)

Conclusion

English reading instruction must be grounded in a clear understanding of language structure and informed by both research evidence and contextual realities. In India, where many learners enter school with limited exposure to English and constrained learning environments, instruction must be explicit, systematic, continuous and meaning-centered.

Above all, the true game changer is the teacher. It is the presence of an educator who notices, listens, and responds to the subtle thinking moves a child makes as they struggle through a word or light up with understanding. Children learn to read not just through methods, but through the steady guidance of adults who know how to support them. This is why teachers deserve consistent, compassionate support, because they are doing the profound work of helping children build a reading brain, shaping the very neural pathways that will open a lifetime of learning and possibility.

References

Bowers, P. N. (2022). Structured Word Inquiry (SWI): Literacy instruction that makes sense of English spelling for students of all ages and abilities. OSF Preprints. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/aktzw
Chall, J., & Jacobs, V. (2003). The classic study on poor children’s fourth-grade slump. American Educator, 27(1).
Chall, J. S. (1983). Stages of Reading Development. New York, NY: McGraw‑Hill. Review of Stages of Reading Development, by J. S. Chall. Applied Psycholinguistics, 5(3), 285–292.
Dehaene, S. (2009). Reading in the brain: The new science of how we read. Penguin.
Houck, B. D. (n.d.). Dismantling the myth of learning to read and reading to learn.
National Reading Panel & Snow, C. E., Burns, M. S., & Griffin, P. (1998). Preventing reading difficulties in young children. National Academy Press.
Templeton, S. (n.d.). Spelling: Logical, learnable, and critical. Reading Rockets.
ASER Centre. (2024). ASER 2024 national findings (summary).

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Srija Jampana | Deputy Manager – Education