CLAT 2026 English Syllabus- Check Preparation Books, Previous Year Questions, Mock Test

The CLAT English Syllabus assesses a candidate’s proficiency in the English language through comprehension, grammar, and vocabulary skills. As per the CLAT 2026 Syllabus, the English section contributes around 20% of the total marks in the UG examination. The CLAT 2026 syllabus for English is designed at the 12th-grade level, matching the eligibility for most students. The CLAT English syllabus consists of:

1. Reading comprehension passages (450–500 words)
2. Inference-based questions
3. Word meaning in context
4. Synonyms & antonyms
5. Idioms & phrases
6. Grammar-based error detection

The CLAT Syllabus 2026 for the English section includes 24–28 questions carrying 1 mark each, with a negative marking of 0.25 marks for every wrong answer. There is no negative marking for unattempted questions.

As per previous year trends in CLAT exam, students getting admission to top NLU’s score 85%+ accuracy in the English section. Many students recommend that building reading habits early from The Hindu or The Indian Express helps improve reading speed and comprehension. You must start at least 5 months before the exam, slowly increasing practice with mock tests and timed reading.

Also Read

• How to Prepare for CLAT English
• List of top English Questions asked in CLAT

What is CLAT English Syllabus 2026?

The CLAT English syllabus for 2026 consists of Reading Comprehension, Idioms & Phrases, Figures of Speech, and many more. The CLAT English syllabus passages are taken from fiction, non-fiction, contemporary articles, historical writings, and opinion pieces. The difficulty level is similar to Class 12 English but focuses more on analytical reading than rote grammar.

• The passages will be approximately 450-500 words long
• The passages will be drawn from contemporary journalistic, fictional, and non-fictional sources.
• You must expect questions on the main idea, inferences, tone, vocabulary in context, and summaries.

The video by PW CLAT for CLAT English Syllabus provides reading comprehension, vocabulary, grammar, sentence correction, and inference-based questions.

How Many Questions Are There in the CLAT English Syllabus?

The CLAT 2026 English syllabus comprises 22 to 26 questions. With the examination consisting of 120 questions in total, the English syllabus for CLAT section constitutes approximately 20% of the overall paper.

Can you provide some of the most essential Topics for CLAT 2026 English Syllabus?

Sure, some topics in the English syllabus for CLAT are very crucial, and you should consider spending more time on them as well. Below, we have listed the most important topics in the English syllabus.

• Grammar
• Vocabulary
• Sentence Structure
• Answering Direct Questions
• Syntax and Errors

What are the Important Topics in CLAT English Syllabus

The English syllabus for CLAT consists of various topics revolving around grammar, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. Knowing the syllabus will give you a fair idea about the topics you need to focus more on.

Below are the important topics under the CLAT English Language section:

CLAT English Syllabus Questions

The questions from previous years' CLAT papers for the English section are as under:

Passage 1

I grew up in a small town not far from Kalimpong. In pre-liberalization India, everything arrived late: not just material things but also ideas. Magazines — old copies of Reader’s Digest and National Geographic — arrived late too, after the news had become stale by months or, often, years. This temporal gap turned journalism into literature, news into legend, and historical events into something akin to plotless stories. But like those

who knew no other life, we accepted this as the norm. The dearth of reading material in towns and villages in socialist India is hard to imagine, and it produced two categories of people: those who stopped reading after school or college, and those — including children — who read anything they could find. I read road signs with the enthusiasm that attaches to reading thrillers. When the iterant kabadiwala, collector of papers,

magazines, and rejected things, visited our neighbourhood, I rushed to the house where he was doing business. He bought things at unimaginably low prices from those who’d stopped having any use for them, and I rummaged through his sacks of old magazines. Sometimes, on days when business was good, he allowed me a couple of copies of Sportsworld magazine for free. I’d run home and, ignoring my mother’s scolding, plunge

right in — consuming news about India’s victory in the Benson and Hedges Cup. Two takeaways from these experiences have marked my understanding of the provincial reader’s life: the sense of belatedness, of everything coming late, and the desire for pleasure in language. Speaking of belatedness, the awareness of having been born at the wrong time in history, of inventing things that had already been discovered

elsewhere, far away, without our knowledge or cooperation, is a moment of epiphany and deep sadness. I remember a professor’s choked voice, narrating to me how all the arguments he’d made in his doctoral dissertation, written over many, many years of hard work (for there indeed was a time when PhDs were written over decades), had suddenly come to naught after he’d discovered the work of C.W.E. Bigsby. This,

I realised as I grew older, was one of the characteristics of provincial life: that they (usually males) were saying trite things with the confidence of someone declaring them for the first time. I, therefore, grew up surrounded by would-be Newtons who claimed to have discovered gravity (again). There’s a deep sense of tragedy attending this sort of thing — the sad embarrassment of always arriving after the party is over. And there’s a

harsh word for that sense of belatedness: “dated.” What rescues it is the unpredictability of these anachronistic “discoveries” — the randomness and haphazardness involved in mapping connections among thoughts and ideas, in a way that hasn’t yet been professionalised. [Extracted, with edits and revisions, from “The Provincial Reader”, by Sumana Roy, Los Angeles Review of Books]

1. What use was the kabadiwala (wastepicker) to the author?

(A) The kabadiwala bought up all her magazines.

(B) The kabadiwala’s stock of books and magazines were of interest to the

author.

(C) The kabadiwala was about to steal the author’s magazines.

(D) The author ordered books online which the kabadiwala delivered.

2. What according to the author is essential about the experience of being a ‘provincial reader’?

(A) Belatedness in the sense of coming late for everything.

(B) Over-eagerness.

(C) Accepting a temporal gap between what was current in the wider world and

the time at which these arrived in the provincial location.

(D) None of the above

3. Why did the author feel a sense of epiphany and deep sadness?

(A) Because the things that felt special and unique to the author, were already

established and accepted thought in the wider world.

(B) Because the author was less well-read than others.

(C) Because the author missed being in a big city.

(D) All the above

4. What does the word ‘anachronistic’ as used in the passage, mean?

(A) Rooted in a non-urban setting

(B) Related to a mofussil area

(C) Connected with another time

(D) Opposed to prevailing sensibilities

5. Which of the following options captures the meaning of the last sentence best?

(A) Though the author feels provincial, she pretends to be from the metropolis.

(B) Though the author feels dated in her access to intellectual ideas, her lack

of metropolitan sophistication lets her engage with the ideas with some

originality.

(C) Though the author is aware of the limitedness of her knowledge, she is

confident and can hold her own in a crowd. She also proud of her roots in the

small town.

(D) All the above

Passage 2

Until the Keeladi site was discovered, archaeologists by and large believed that the Gangetic plains in the north urbanised significantly earlier than Tamil Nadu. Historians have often claimed that large scale town life in India first developed in the Greater Magadha region of the Gangetic basin. This was during the ‘second urbanisation’ phase. The ‘first urbanisation phase’ refers to the rise of the Harappan or Indus Valley Civilisation. Tamil Nadu was thought to have urbanised at this scale only by the third century BCE. The findings at Keeladi push that date back significantly. Based on linguistics and continuity in cultural legacies, connections between the Indus Valley Civilisation, or IVC, and old Tamil traditions have long been suggested, but concrete archaeological evidence remained absent. Evidence indicated similarities between

graffiti found in Keeladi and symbols associated with the IVC. It bolstered the arguments of dissidents from the dominant North Indian imagination, who have argued for years that their ancestors existed contemporaneously with the IVC. All the archaeologists I spoke to said it was too soon to make definitive links between the Keeladi site and the IVC. There is no doubt, however, that the discovery at Keeladi has changed the paradigm. In recent years, the results of any new research on early India have invited keen political interest, because proponents of Hindu nationalism support the notion of Vedic culture as fundamental to the origins of Indian civilisation. The Keeladi excavations further challenge the idea of a single fountainhead of Indian life. They indicate the possibility that the earliest identity that can recognisably be considered ‘Indian’ might not have originated in North India. That wasn’t all. In subsequent seasons of the Keeladi dig, archaeologists discovered that Tamili, a variant of the Brahmi script used for writing inscriptions in the early iterations of the Tamil language, could be dated back to the sixth century BCE, likely a hundred years before previously thought. So not only had urban life thrived in the Tamil lands, but people who lived there had developed their

own script. “The evolution of writing is attributed to Ashoka’s edicts, but 2600 years ago writing was prevalent in Keeladi,” Mathan Karuppiah, a proud Madurai local, told me. “A farmer could write his own name on a pot he owned. The fight going on here is ‘You are not the one to teach me to write, I have learnt it myself.’ ” [Excerpted from “The Dig”, by Sowmiya Ashok, Fifty-Two]

1. What was the assumption about the origin of urban life in India before the Keeladi dig?

(A) The origins lay in the northern Gangetic plains, which urbanised earlier than

the south.

(B) The Indus Valley Civilization was the first urban civilization of India.

(C) The second urbanization was known to be in the Magadha empire.

(D) Both (A) and (B)

2 “The Keeladi excavations further challenge the idea of a single fountainhead of Indian life.” — in elaboration of this sentence, which of these options follows?

(A) Dominant theories of how urban and modern life came about in ancient India were proved wrong by the Keeladi archaeological dig.

(B) Neither the Indus Valley Civilization, nor the ancient urban civilization of Magadha are clear explanations of how urban life emerged in the Keeladi region of southern India in the third century BCE.

(C) The Keeladi archaeological dig proved that Indian urban and modern life emerged independently in several historical periods and geographies, and no one theory is enough to explain it.

(D) None of the above

3. Language, including a script similar to the Brahmi script, emerged in Keeladi in the sixth century BCE. Which of the following is the most convincing conclusion from this statement?

(A) Keeladi is a centre of culture and learning far superior to any others in ancient India.

(B) People of Keeladi were illiterate and could not use language to inscribe on their pots and pans.

(C) Ancient urban history of India, as we know it today, could significantly be altered by the findings of the advances achieved by the Keeladi civilization.

(D) All the above

4. BCE is the acronym for:

(A) Before the Common Era

(B) Before Colloquial Era

(C) Before Chapel Eternal

(D) Behind Christ Era

5. “A farmer could write his own name on a pot he owned. The fight going on here is ‘You are not the one to teach me to write, I have learnt it myself.’ ” — These sentences imply:

(A) That the Keeladi civilization was an inegalitarian one.

(B) That the Keeladi civilization did not conserve the access to education and literacy only for the elite.

(C) That the farmers of the Keeladi civilization were also potters.

(D) All the above

How To Prepare English Language For CLAT 2026?

Preparing for the English language section of the Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) requires a combination of reading, practicing, and refining your language skills. We have provided the section-wise preparation tips for CLAT 2026.

Reading Comprehension:

• You must practice reading passages from diverse topics. This will not only improve your comprehension skills but also expose you to different writing styles.
• You must work on understanding the main idea, supporting details, and the author’s tone of the passage.
• Practicing CLAT by answering questions related to the passages will save time and improve your speed

Grammar and Vocabulary:

• You must brush up on your grammar rules. Focus on topics like tenses, articles, prepositions, and sentence structure.
• Expanding your Vocabulary by reading more words will help you understand the passage better and reduce time to complete the test.
• Solve vocabulary-based exercises and practice antonyms and synonyms.

Legal Aptitude:

• The English section of CLAT 2026 often includes legal reasoning questions. So you must familiarize yourself with legal terminology and concepts.
• Practice solving legal reasoning problems to improve your analytical skills.

Writing Skills:

• Practice essay writing on various topics and pay attention to structuring your essays logically. This will help to explain your thoughts clearly.
• Work on improving your grammar and punctuation to ensure your writing is precise and error-free.

Previous Year Papers: Solving previous years’ CLAT question papers helps understand the exam pattern and the type of questions asked.

Mock Tests:

• Take regular mock tests to simulate exam conditions. This will help you manage your time and build endurance for the actual test.
• Analyze your mistakes and focus on improving in areas where you face challenges.

Group Discussions: Engage in group discussions with peers to enhance your communication skills and improve your ability to articulate your thoughts effectively.

Also Read

• How to Prepare for СLАT 2026
• How to Prepare for CLAT English

What kinds of English skills are tested on the CLAT exam 2026?

To take the exam, you need to master some of the crucial skills during your preparation stage. We have listed some of the necessary skills.

• Reading and understanding the passage's primary idea as well as any arguments and points of view presented therein
• Making deductions and conclusions from the passage
• Summarizing the text in the passage
• Comparing and contrasting the opinions expressed in the passage
• Recognize the meaning of the different terms and expressions used in the passage.

CLAT English Syllabus Books 2026

Some books to practise for this section are as follows-

• Word Power Made Easy by Norman Lewis;
• Pearson Guide to CLAT 2020 by Pearson;
• A comprehensive study for CLAT & LLB Entrance Examinations- SET, AILET, LSAT by Padma Parupudi and Sirisha Naresh;
• High School English Grammar and Composition Key by Wren & Martin;
• Objective General English 2020 by RS Aggarwal;
• Objective General English 2020 by AP Bharadwaj