Project, Portfolio and Internal Assessment Components
English at DHSE level carries an internal component assessed by the school - typically a project report, a portfolio of written work, and an oral or presentation element, with weightings fixed by the current DHSE/SCERT scheme. Confirm this year's circular with your teacher rather than relying on last year's marks split. The exam-relevant skill is the same either way: you must be able to describe and defend a small piece of independent work.
Anatomy of a project report
Cover page → certificate → acknowledgements → contents → introduction and rationale → objectives → methodology → data or textual analysis → findings → conclusion → references. The objectives must be answerable by the method you choose. “To study English” is not an objective; “to record twenty English loan words used by shopkeepers in my locality and classify them by domain” is.
Portfolio
A portfolio is evidence of process, not a fair-copy file: drafts with teacher/peer comments, a reading log with dated responses, a writing task revised after feedback, and a short reflection on what changed and why.
Worked example
Topic: English loan words in the language of my local market. Method: an observation schedule plus short interviews with twenty shopkeepers; record the word, the domain (food, finance, transport), and whether a Malayalam equivalent exists. Findings: a frequency table showing finance terms dominate. Conclusion: borrowing follows the domains where English entered commerce first. Viva preparation: be able to explain one surprising entry and one limitation of your sample.
Traps
- Copy-pasted content; the viva exposes it immediately.
- Objectives that the data cannot answer.
- No methodology section, so findings look invented.
- Missing references, or a bibliography listing sites you never opened.
- A portfolio with no drafts, dates or reflections.