Dialect, Guidebooks and the Unseen Passage
Class XII Hindi Elective, 39 students in a Gurugram government school. In the last unit test, unseen passage scores averaged 44%; inference questions were attempted by 30 students but only 9 scored full marks. In long-answer questions, students reproduce guidebook answers for known chapters and score 8/10, but on a question asking them to compare two poems they score 3/10. Scripts show Haryanvi forms such as 'म्हारे गाँव में', 'घणा दिन' and 'बेरा' in formal answers, and matra errors in 24 scripts. One student wrote a sincere paragraph in Haryanvi in the margin saying Hindi 'belongs to books'. The head of department wants a week of dictation and punishment for dialect use. The teacher has five periods before the pre-board and must also complete the syllabus.
1. How should the teacher respond to the head of department's proposal, using multilingual pedagogy rather than punishment?
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The proposal confuses dialect with error and punishment with pedagogy. NCF 2005 treats the home language as a resource, not a deficit. Haryanvi forms such as 'म्हारे' and 'घणा' are rule-governed; the learner needs to add a formal register, not erase the home variety. A contrastive approach works better: put the dialect form and the standard form side by side, ask students to notice the difference, and practise the standard form in a context where it matters, such as a letter to an editor or an interview. A week of isolated dictation may raise spelling scores briefly but will not build inference or register control. Punishment risks silence and shame, especially for first-generation learners. The teacher should tell the head of department that the syllabus can be completed while embedding ten minutes of register work in each period. The aim is additive bilingualism: the student keeps Haryanvi for home and community and gains formal Hindi for public purposes.
2. Design a five-period plan that targets unseen-passage inference and register awareness without abandoning the syllabus.
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Period 1: model inference with a short unseen paragraph. The teacher thinks aloud: the passage does not say the family was poor, so which words suggest it? Students annotate. Period 2: question-type sort into literal, inference, vocabulary-in-context and author's purpose. In pairs, students write one question of each type and answer another pair's. Period 3: register comparison. Give four sentences, two in Haryanvi and two in formal Hindi; students identify which would suit a letter to the editor and why, then rewrite one dialect sentence into formal Hindi while keeping the meaning. Period 4: guidebook deconstruction. Show a guide answer to a known poem and ask what it does not explain; students write a 60-word answer in their own words with one textual quotation. Period 5: timed unseen passage of eight minutes plus peer checking against a rubric. Homework: ten minutes of matra pattern practice, not dictation as punishment.
3. What assessment and remediation steps would reduce guidebook dependence and improve inference?
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Guidebook dependence is a reading-and-writing problem, not a discipline problem. Use unseen texts and require textual evidence; a student who has memorised a summary cannot point to the line that supports the claim. In assessment, give one seen and one unseen question; make the unseen question require a comparison or a judgement, and ask for a short oral justification for one answer. Use a portfolio of three drafts: the first in class, the second with peer feedback, the third revised; grade the revision, not the copied version. For matras, keep a personal error log in which each student lists five recurring errors and corrects them in their own writing. For inference, use think-aloud pairs once a week. This is slower than dictation but it builds transfer, which is what the pre-board and board examination reward.