When Words Get in the Way: How Plain Language Unlocks Grade-Level Content

Rewriting the gatekeepers: How educators can decouple linguistic complexity from academic rigour to support diverse learners.

Many students can do the maths—but can’t access the question. This piece explores how plain language can unlock grade-level learning by removing barriers in how we ask, not what we ask. Every sentence is a choice.

Introduction

It’s the end of the year, and I’m proctoring again. The room is quiet in that heavy, suspended way that only testing rooms seem to manage—screens lit, pencils still, the atmosphere brittle with expectation. I move slowly between rows, glancing down at students’ faces. What I see isn’t confusion so much as detachment—students staring blankly at their screens, not because they don’t care, and not because they don’t know, but because they can’t find a way in. I kneel beside one, ask quietly if they’re alright. A small nod, the kind that’s more polite than confident. I glance at the question—it's not unfamiliar, not impossible. In fact, I know this student could reason their way through it if we were on whiteboards, in conversation, or just given the space to sketch. But the way the question is written—layered, abstract, saturated with formal phrasing—it’s become a gate, not a guide. And I realise, not for the first time, that they haven’t been tested on the content. They’ve been tested on whether they can decode the delivery method.

I’ve written before about the tyranny of BigTest—the high-stakes structures that warp teaching into a performance of compliance. But this isn’t just about that. This is something quieter and more pervasive. It’s in every digital platform, every curriculum-aligned textbook, every so-called intervention tool. The further we move up the grade levels, the more the language thickens. Not the maths—the language. As I’ve co-taught Algebra 1 and Algebra 2 this year, I’ve watched again and again as linguistic complexity escalates alongside content, not because the standards demand it, but because our instructional materials conflate academic rigour with syntactic density. The assumption seems to be that if you’re learning more advanced maths, you must also be able to process more advanced prose.

But that’s not how access works. Access isn’t about lowering expectations. It’s about realising that the content and the container are not the same. Language is not the standard—it is the delivery method. And when the method fails, the student does not. They’re simply being asked to do two things at once: demonstrate their conceptual understanding whilst simultaneously navigating an increasingly convoluted path to the question itself. For some, the delivery system becomes the barrier. For many of our students—those with SLDs, autistic gestalt processors, multilingual learners—it becomes the shutdown point.

And so I’m left reflecting: What would shift if we reimagined our commitment to grade-level content not as a fixed linguistic ritual, but as a flexible, equitable invitation? What might change if we taught as though the student’s thinking mattered more than their decoding? This piece is both a reflection and a call to action—because the work of inclusion doesn’t end at placement. It lives in the sentence structure. It lives in the way we ask the question.

Who Gets Shut Out?

In theory, we design with all learners in mind. In practice, the ones most affected by the way language mediates access to content are often the very students whose needs are already flattened into acronyms—SLD, AUT, ELL—as if their complexity could be tidily coded. But I’ve come to see that these labels often obscure more than they reveal. Students with Specific Learning Disabilities (SLDs), for instance, are frequently those whose brains process and express information in richly non-linear, pattern-driven, gestalt ways—but because they don’t fit the sentence structures expected of them, their intelligence is filtered through deficit. In fact, SLD can often become a placeholder—a code—for a GLP whose way of making sense of the world was never supported in the first place.

Autistic students, too, show up here—but not always in the ways our systems are designed to notice. Many autistic learners could qualify under multiple eligibility categories. They might have language-based processing differences, executive function challenges, or sensory integration needs that deeply affect how they access and express learning. But more often than not, it’s the observable behaviours—the meltdowns, the shutdowns, the stims, the “non-compliance”—that get them flagged for AUT eligibility. The internal complexities? Those tend to be either ignored or pathologised.

Then there are our multilingual learners—newcomers navigating curriculum in their second or third language, often whilst grieving family, country, or safety. Too often, their cognitive abilities are underestimated because they can’t immediately produce evidence of understanding in the format the test requires. I’ve sat in too many data meetings where language struggles are mistaken for cognitive ones, where decoding difficulty is equated with low ability, where the student is quietly moved toward SLD pathways not because they belong there, but because no one knew what else to do.

What unites these students isn’t their diagnosis. It’s the fact that they are being asked to perform intellectual tasks through delivery systems that were never built for them. In the general education classroom, where the pace moves fast and the language is assumed to be neutral, these students are not just behind—they’re locked out. And unless we intervene in the delivery method itself, no amount of differentiation, scaffolding, or co-teaching will truly make the content accessible.

Decoupling the Standard from the Sentence

So much of the confusion—and resistance—around accessibility in secondary content stems from a misunderstanding of what “grade-level” actually means. Grade-level content refers to the concepts students are expected to master, the skills they are meant to apply, the thinking they’re invited into. It does not mean convoluted sentence structures, multi-clause prompts, or tasks wrapped in dense academic phrasing. But somewhere along the line, our instructional materials started treating linguistic complexity as a proxy for academic depth. The more advanced the maths, the more advanced the language—not by necessity, but by tradition.

I’ve seen this play out most clearly in co-taught Algebra and Geometry classrooms. Take a typical trigonometry problem involving right triangles. In the original phrasing, you might get something like: “Given a triangle with a hypotenuse of 10 units and a side of 8 units, determine the length of the remaining side using an appropriate theorem. Justify your answer.” A student with strong reasoning but limited language processing might freeze at “hypotenuse” or stumble over “justify” and “appropriate theorem.” But rephrased—“This is a right triangle. One side is 8. The longest side is 10. What is the missing side length? Explain how you found your answer.”—the task remains mathematically identical. The standard hasn’t changed. The level hasn’t dropped. The content is the same. What’s changed is the entry point.

This is what I mean when I say we must decouple the standard from the sentence. The standard is the destination—it tells us what the student should know or be able to do. But how we get them there? That’s the delivery system. When we treat the phrasing of a question as inviolable, when we insist that only students who can wade through abstract academic English deserve to access advanced concepts, we confuse rigour with exclusion. We uphold a linguistic ritual that serves almost no one—and actively harms many.

The truth is, many published curricula and adaptive platforms are built on this conflation. The materials get more difficult not only in content, but in form. They assume that if students are to demonstrate mastery, they must also do so in a particular voice, in a particular rhythm, using particular words. But that’s not the standard. That’s just habit. And habits can be rewritten.

Plain Language as Pedagogical Equity

Plain language, at its core, is a practice of precision with access in mind. It’s not about “dumbing down” or oversimplifying. It’s about removing unnecessary barriers so that the actual learning—the content, the reasoning, the thinking—can emerge clearly. It uses short sentences, clear vocabulary, active voice, and consistent structure. It doesn’t strip away complexity; it strips away noise.

In educational spaces, especially in secondary content areas like maths and science, this often gets misunderstood. Teachers are trained to think in terms of Depth of Knowledge (DOK) levels—to distinguish between recall, skill application, strategic reasoning, and extended thinking. But somewhere along the way, the profession absorbed the idea that linguistic difficulty was synonymous with cognitive rigour. It isn’t. You can absolutely reach DOK 3 or 4 with plain language. You can ask students to analyse, justify, evaluate, problem-solve—all whilst using clear, accessible phrasing. In fact, for many students, that’s the only way they can reach those levels of thinking.

Plain language reduces cognitive load by freeing up working memory. When students aren’t spending all their mental energy decoding the sentence structure, they can actually focus on what’s being asked. This is especially critical for students with SLDs, autistic GLPs, and multilingual learners, whose working memory may already be taxed by language processing, sensory input, or translation demands. By offering clean, direct language, we’re not removing the challenge—we’re making room for it.

It also gives students the conceptual footholds they need to build toward more advanced vocabulary. A student has to understand “longest side” before “hypotenuse” can stick. They need to feel confident with “turns” or “quarters of a circle” before “radian measure” makes any meaningful sense. Plain language creates the scaffold. It doesn’t prevent students from climbing—it gives them something to climb on.

This approach aligns beautifully with Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which asks us to offer multiple means of representation so that all students can access and engage with content. It also sits firmly within the principles of cognitive load theory, which reminds us that learning happens best when the extraneous demands of a task are minimised. We’re not talking about shortcuts here. We’re talking about clarity. About respect. About offering every student—not just the ones fluent in test language—a fair shot at the learning we say matters most.

Anticipating and Countering Pushback

One of the most common pushbacks I hear—especially in secondary maths—is this: “If I simplify the language, it’s no longer grade-level.” The concern is often rooted in good intentions: teachers want to uphold rigour, to ensure students are being challenged and are engaging with the standards as written. But this framing misunderstands what grade-level instruction actually requires, and where the boundary between access and dilution really lies.

Let’s be clear: the standard lives in the concept, not in the syntax. If a student is being asked to solve a quadratic equation, interpret a trigonometric function, or explain the proportional relationship between arc length and radius, then they are doing grade-level work—regardless of whether the question was phrased with academic elegance or with plain-spoken clarity.

Take an Algebra 2 example. A textbook might frame a task like this:
“Determine the x-values for which the quadratic expression f(x) = x² – 5x + 6 yields a non-negative output. Justify your response using appropriate algebraic reasoning.”

There’s nothing wrong with that sentence from a syntactic point of view—if you're a fluent reader of academic English. But for many students, particularly those with language processing challenges, the structure obscures the maths. The cognitive demand isn’t in finding where the quadratic is greater than or equal to zero—it’s in parsing “yields a non-negative output” and “appropriate algebraic reasoning.”

Rewritten in plain language, it might sound like this:
“When is f(x) = x² – 5x + 6 greater than or equal to 0? Show how you solved it.”

The student is still interpreting the graph or factoring the expression. They’re still reasoning through the intervals. Nothing about the mathematical content has changed. What’s changed is the delivery—the ramp, not the staircase.

And this distinction matters, especially when we consider the legal and ethical obligations placed on public education. Under IDEA and Section 504, students with disabilities are entitled to access to the general education curriculum. That access must be equitable, not identical. FAPE—the promise of a free appropriate public education—doesn’t mean every student gets the same materials in the same way. It means that each student must be able to engage meaningfully with grade-level content, and that includes accommodations to the form the content takes.

When we insist on rigid, academic phrasing as the mark of rigour, we’re not protecting the integrity of the standard—we’re narrowing the field of who gets to succeed. We start evaluating students not on whether they understand a function or can model a scenario, but on whether they can decipher phrasing like “in what domain does the inverse function yield real outputs?” That’s not maths. That’s a reading test wearing a maths costume.

Plain language allows us to assess what students know, not how well they’ve learned to mimic academic register. It preserves the demand of the task whilst widening the path to entry. It acknowledges that many students can think critically, model mathematically, and reason abstractly if they’re given access points that don’t require navigating linguistic gymnastics first.

The staircase is still the same height. We’re just offering a ramp. And when you’re working with students who have been told—implicitly or otherwise—that they don’t belong in the upper levels of mathematical thinking, that ramp can be the difference between engagement and shutdown, between growth and retreat, between staying in the room and quietly disappearing from it.

Implementation in Real Classrooms

So what does this look like in a real classroom? Who actually carries this out?

The official answer is shared responsibility: general education teachers deliver content, while RSPs and case managers provide support. But the reality, as every special educator knows, is uneven. In some classrooms, co-planning happens. In others, you’re lucky if accommodations get a passing glance. And in far too many, students with IEPs—especially those in unsupported general ed settings—are left navigating materials that were never designed with them in mind.

This year, co-teaching Algebra 1, my autistic, gestalt-processing brain began noticing a pattern—sharp, consistent, undeniable. None of our students with IEPs could independently read a paragraph-length word problem and generate a formula to solve it. Not one. But it wasn’t just the students with IEPs. A majority of the so-called “typical” students were also struggling—not with the maths, but with the delivery system. And that made the question unavoidable: Is the problem that these kids aren’t good at maths? Or is the problem that we’ve confused linguistic decoding with mathematical understanding?

Take one common example. A textbook warm-up posed this:
“A rectangular garden has an area of 30 square metres and a length that is 3 metres more than the width. Write and solve an equation to find the possible dimensions of the garden.”

Most students blinked at the screen. Some froze. Others made wild guesses, wrote disconnected numbers, or skipped the item entirely. But when I sat beside them, whiteboard in hand, and rephrased it—“This rectangle has an area of 30. The length is 3 more than the width. What are the length and width?”—they lit up. They could visualise it. They asked questions. They sketched. Some of them solved it faster than I did.

The difference wasn’t ability. It was entry point.

And what consistently revealed the real problem wasn’t the digital platform, or the problem set, or the curriculum pacing guide—it was the whiteboard. It was sitting with a student, 1:1, and saying, “Talk me through what you’re seeing.” Because when the question is human-sized—when it’s spoken, visualised, explored—the student who “can’t do Algebra” starts offering insights about inverse operations, symmetry, and how they remembered doing something similar back in the 8th grade.

This is what we’re missing when we rely on rigid formats and assume that linguistic formality equals rigour. Implementation doesn’t always mean following a protocol. Sometimes it means recognising that the entire system has been delivering questions in a form the student cannot enter—and that the simplest rewrite, or the smallest sketch, is the most powerful intervention we have.

So yes, the question of who’s responsible matters. But what matters more is that someone notices. Someone notices the freeze—not as laziness or defiance, but as a signal. Someone breaks the sentence down, draws the diagram, asks the right question. Someone offers not just the accommodation, but the recognition: It’s not that you can’t do this. It’s that we’ve been asking in the wrong way.

What PD Needs to Shift

If this shift is going to stick—if plain language is going to move from a one-off accommodation to a widespread, equity-driven practice—then professional development has to evolve. And not just in content, but in purpose. We need PD that empowers general education teachers not with compliance checklists, but with genuine understanding, shared language, and the tools to redesign access from the ground up.

At the centre of that is a deceptively simple idea: the difference between content and format. Teachers need time and space to unpack what the standard actually requires, and what part of the instructional materials are just tradition, legacy phrasing, or test-prep mimicry. They need opportunities to practice rewriting questions in plain language—side by side with colleagues, across departments, and with SpEd and ELD specialists as full co-designers. And they need more than theory. They need examples, templates, sentence stems, and visual scaffolds that can be slotted into tomorrow’s lesson without burning out tonight.

But more than that, they need voice.

Now more than ever, teachers—and teacher unions—must insist on shaping the PD landscape. In a time when “BigTest” drives the curriculum and what we might call the “enshitification” of education continues to hollow out the relational core of teaching, we can’t afford to hand over our professional growth to corporate vendors or prepackaged compliance modules. The kind of PD we need is not neutral. It is pedagogically and politically urgent. This one—relearning how to write and speak accessibly—is not just for students with IEPs. It’s for the student who always hovers just above the fail line, who passes enough not to raise red flags, but never really understands what they’re doing. It’s for the multilingual student who gets by with pattern recognition but has never been offered an authentic entry point into mathematical language. It’s for the teacher who knows something’s not working, but hasn’t been given the time or structure to rethink it.

This kind of PD is low-cost, high-impact, and radically inclusive. It doesn’t demand new curriculum or expensive platforms. It demands a shift in perspective—and a commitment to act on it. When teachers understand how language shapes access, they can begin to reshape the classroom itself. And in that reshaping, more students will enter. More students will stay. More students will think.

Final thoughts …

I think back to that student in the testing room, eyes fixed on the screen, body still, mind visibly elsewhere. I think of all the moments I’ve witnessed like that—shoulders tensing, pencils stilled, the quiet disorientation of trying to make sense of a question that assumes a kind of fluency not yet built. And I wonder how many of those moments have been misread. How many times have we taken silence for disinterest, blank spaces for ignorance, disengagement for defiance—when really, the student was just waiting for a way in.

Plain Language is not just a writing strategy. It’s a pedagogical stance. A belief that every student is capable of complex thought, worthy of rigorous learning, and entitled to access that honours their way of processing. It is a refusal to let language be used as a gatekeeper for intelligence. It is an affirmation that the clarity of the question matters just as much as the challenge of the answer.

If we want students to stay—to show up in the work, to risk an answer, to engage with the beautiful complexity of what we’re asking—we have to make sure they can understand what’s being asked. Not through guesswork. Not through inference. But through clear, direct, well-scaffolded language that invites them into the task rather than standing between them and it.

So I’ll leave you with this: What would shift if we taught like we believed every student was capable—like the problem wasn’t them, but the way we’d been asking? What might unfold if every sentence became a door, not a lock?

Because access isn’t a favour. It’s a foundation. And every word we write, every prompt we offer, every task we frame—each one is a choice. Let’s choose to build belonging. One sentence at a time.