Language I (Kannada, English, Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu or Malayalam)
Language I carries 30 marks and is answered in the language you offer as first language - Kannada, English, Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu or Malayalam. The paper combines language content with the pedagogy of teaching it, so both the correct answer and the defensible classroom decision are tested. Kannada illustrates the points here; the pedagogy is common to all options.
Language content (Kannada illustration)
- Comprehension of unseen gadya and padya: literal, inferential and evaluative questions.
- Sandhi and samasa; vibhakti (case endings), kala (tense), linga and vachana agreement.
- Vocabulary: samanartha (synonyms), virudhartha (antonyms), gade-nudigalu (proverbs and idioms).
- Skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing; skimming for gist, scanning for detail.
Pedagogy
- The structural approach drills graded patterns; the communicative approach puts meaning and use first; whole-language teaching keeps the text intact instead of fragmenting it into letters.
- Oral work precedes writing in Classes 6–8: discuss, then draft.
- Errors reveal an active rule system (interlanguage), so analyse the pattern and remediate rather than merely marking it wrong.
- NCF 2005 treats the multilingual classroom as a resource; the child's home dialect is a bridge, not a defect.
Worked example
Identify the sandhi in ದೇವಾಲಯ. Reasoning: split as ದೇವ + ಆಲಯ. The final ಅ of the first word and the initial ಆ of the second belong to the same savarna group and merge into the long ಆ. Hence savarnadeergha sandhi - not guna sandhi, which gives ಎ, as in ಸುರ + ಇಂದ್ರ = ಸುರೇಂದ್ರ.