Glossing Decisions in a 20-Mark Unseen Passage
Your school is finalising the SSC Sindhi L2 trial paper. The unseen-passage section carries 20 marks: 12 for comprehension, 4 for vocabulary, and 4 for a short personal response. The passage is 170 words about a village milk cooperative and contains six items likely to be unfamiliar to L2 candidates: 'sahkar' (cooperative), 'vehvaar' (behaviour), 'munsif' (arbitrator), 'jaanch' (inspection), 'thaur' (place), and 'haar' (defeat). Three are close to Marathi or Hindi forms; two are false friends in the local spoken variety. In the last trial, 18 of 42 students answered 'What did the arbitrator do?' by copying the sentence containing 'munsif' without naming an action. The vocabulary item asks for one-word synonyms. Your co-teacher wants to gloss all six words in the margin and keep every question unchanged. You have one revision cycle before the paper goes to print, and the section must still discriminate among candidates.
1. Decide which of the six words you would gloss in the margin and which you would leave unglossed. Justify the choice by reference to what the section is measuring.
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Do not gloss all six. Glossing every difficult word turns the passage into a matching exercise and removes the vocabulary item's function.
- Gloss the two false friends, because their local meaning will actively mislead and the error would be lexical, not comprehension-based.
- Gloss 'munsif' only if the comprehension question depends on the legal role; otherwise let the surrounding action ('listened to both sides', 'announced') define it.
- Leave 'sahkar', 'jaanch', 'thaur', and 'haar' unglossed where the context supplies a workable meaning. These test inference from context, which is a legitimate L2 skill.
- If a word is glossed, gloss it in Sindhi, not in English, so the candidate stays inside the target language.
The principle is: gloss misleading meaning, not mere difficulty. This keeps the vocabulary item alive and protects comprehension from a false-friend trap.
2. Rewrite the 'arbitrator' question so that a student cannot answer it by copying the sentence containing 'munsif'. State what the rewritten question now tests.
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Original: 'What did the arbitrator do?' That invites sentence-matching.
Rewritten: 'The arbitrator did not announce a decision immediately. Which two details in the passage show why the decision took time?'
This now tests inference and cohesion. The candidate must locate two separate details, relate them to the delay, and express the relation in their own words. A copied sentence will not satisfy 'two details' unless the student has selected and connected them.
A second acceptable rewrite: 'The writer says the arbitrator's work was difficult. Which phrase in the passage supports this?' This tests the function of a comment rather than recall of a single verb.
In both versions, the mark scheme should award one mark per relevant detail and one mark for the link between them, so that copying without selection earns at most one mark.
3. A student writes 'munsif = judge' as the one-word synonym. How would you mark it, and what reasoning would you record?
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It depends on the mark weight and the item's stated purpose.
- For a 1-mark context synonym, accept 'judge' provisionally if the student has understood the decision-making role. The passage's arbitrator hears both sides and decides, so 'judge' preserves the central function even though it loses the labour/arbitration nuance.
- For a 2-mark exact synonym, award 1 and require a nearer term such as 'arbitrator' or 'neutral decision-maker'. 'Judge' is not exact because a judge belongs to a court, while the passage's figure belongs to a cooperative dispute.
- Record the reasoning: the error is one of precision, not of comprehension. Do not mark it wrong in a way that suggests the student failed to read the passage.
This distinction matters because the vocabulary item should test contextual meaning, not legal terminology recall.