'मोर गाँव' in a Hindi composition: dialect, correction and the child who writes only two lines
A Class 6 Hindi teacher in a Chhattisgarhi-speaking village school has 30 students. Their oral Hindi is fluent and eager, but in written compositions they write forms such as 'मोर गाँव', 'हमर स्कूल' and 'बड़े बइहा'. The textbook lesson uses standard forms - मेरा, हमारा, बैलगाड़ी - and the teacher's established practice is to ring every dialect form in red, count the rings, and require the standard form to be written five times. Since this started, eight students write two lines and stop, though the same eight will narrate the same story orally for five minutes. The half-yearly paper has a ten-mark letter-writing item, and the marking note says marks are for 'शुद्ध हिन्दी'. The teacher has three weeks before the paper and is under pressure from the head teacher about results.
1. Is the students' writing a problem of Hindi, or of something else? Justify your diagnosis using the idea of dialect and of a second dialect rather than a foreign language.
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Diagnosis. This is not a deficit in Hindi. Chhattisgarhi is a rule-governed variety with its own sound correspondences and pronouns; the children are bidialectal, not beginners. Forms like मोर/हमर are systematic, not random, and correspond regularly to मेरा/हमारा. They are therefore the right starting point, not evidence of carelessness.
Why writing has collapsed. The red-ring routine attaches a visible cost to every natural sentence the child can produce. In Krashen's terms the affective filter rises: the child who is corrected on nearly every line learns that the safe move is to write less. Eight students writing two lines is avoidance, not inability - the same eight narrate orally for five minutes, which proves they have content, vocabulary and sequencing.
The real target. The child must learn to shift register according to audience, which is a metalinguistic skill. That requires contrast, not erasure: 'at home and in the playground we say मोर; in a letter to the Block Education Officer we write मेरा'. Erasing the dialect teaches the child that school language is a different world, and writing stays short.
2. Lay out a three-week plan that gets these students writing at length in standard Hindi without devaluing Chhattisgarhi.
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Week 1 – oral to written, dialect admitted in the first draft. Begin every composition orally in pairs, in the children's own variety. The first draft is written without any red pen; the teacher responds only to content with two comments and one question. This restores length first, accuracy later.
Week 2 – contrastive charts, three features only. Build a class chart: मोर–मेरा, हमर–हमारा, and one verb form the lesson needs. Discuss the pattern as a sound correspondence, not a mistake. In the second draft children mark their own dialect forms with a pencil and convert only the three features taught; everything else is left alone. Marking by the teacher is limited to those three, so the ring count stops being a wall of red.
Week 3 – audience and the letter. Set the ten-mark letter as a real task: a letter to the sarpanch about the school hand pump. Teach salutation, purpose sentence, three points, closing. Peer editing uses a three-item checklist (did the reader understand the purpose? are all three points there? are the three target features in standard form?). Publish two letters on the wall to make standard Hindi a tool for a real reader.
3. How should the ten-mark letter be assessed so that the marking note's demand for 'शुद्ध हिन्दी' does not punish these children unfairly?
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Split the rubric before the paper is written. Ten marks as content and organisation 4, range of expression 3, and only the taught standard features 3. 'शुद्ध हिन्दी' should be operationalised as a short, public list - the three contrastive features plus punctuation of the salutation - not as an impression of purity. Anything not taught and not listed cannot be deducted.
Prepare them for the format, not for trickery. They should write at least three full letters in the exam format in the final week, including one timed. Announce that dialect forms in the planning space will not be penalised, so planning in their own variety is safe.
Handle the marking note honestly. If the external marking scheme is worded loosely, teach to the same features the scheme rewards but grade in class using the transparent rubric, and show children the rubric. This is not lowering the standard: a child who writes a complete, purposeful, well-organised letter with the three features controlled has met a defensible standard, and the class average will rise because length and structure are no longer suppressed by fear.