We present a new adaptive control technique for induction motors. We first treat certain signals in the system as fictitious control signals to a simpler subsystem. An adaptive technique is used in this stage to design the fictitious controllers. Then we apply the sliding mode method to robustly realize the fictitious adaptive signals. The method is robust to parameter variations, and the stability analysis is simple. Another advantage of our method is that we only require a reduced-order system to be linearly parameterizable (LP); the rest of the system dynamics can be highly nonlinear, with no LP requirement. Full state feedback is not needed for implementation. In particular, the rotor flux measurement is not needed. Load torque and rotor resistance can be unknown but bounded.