Assuming that the learning acquisition (versus learning) hypothesis holds true, individuals socialized to the different forms of English and/or a heritage language have a general understanding of these various forms of language and when it is appropriate to use them. Some bilingual children, however, may be socialized only to the everyday form of their heritage language and/or English.

Academic language may not be part of their language development experience. In short, the student must not only learn English; he or she must also learn academic English, a more complex task that usually takes place in the classroom and is not practiced on the street or the playground. This can become a problem that is often not easy to detect until the child begins to do extensive writing in class.

Schools then must explicitly present academic English, relate it to their own linguistic repertoire, and create authentic situations for use of the academic variety. Students who do not experience this language in their daily social environments need not only to experience it in the classroom but also to be convinced that they have the ability and the right to acquire it without feeling that to do so, they have to abandon their familiar forms of language or disregard their social identities.

Teachers should allow students to use their everyday language when discussing matters in class among themselves and also support the use of academic English when students are doing class presentations. For example, one teacher regularly assigned students to develop PowerPoint presentations of their group work to share with the rest of the class. Such an activity required students to consider not only the content but also the language of the presentation. Written reports are also good contexts in which to practice the written form of academic English.

Pauline Gibbons argues that presenting all the various forms of language in the classroom context helps students develop academic language as well as understand the differences between the forms. Academic English is part of the linguistic repertoire that successful students need to develop, not because it is "better" than their language or other forms of English, but because students should have it available for use when they need it. Various disciplines depend on their own forms of academic language to express particular meanings and specialized knowledge, and teachers need to know the structures of these differing academic languages in order to make them explicit to students.

Yet academic language is sometimes made more difficult than necessary, as when authors try to inflate the value of their writing by deliberately making it sound highbrow and overly intellectual. It is important, therefore, to determine whether the purported difficulty of a text is in fact required by the nature of the communication. Teachers and students alike need to take a critical stance with respect to academic English: to teach it and learn it but also to be able to identify its proper uses as well as its pitfalls.

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