Marking 'own words' and click orthography in the same mock paper
At a Windhoek secondary school the Grade 12 Khoekhoegowab First Language group of 36 candidates writes the mock Paper 1 (Reading comprehension and language structures). Question 1 is a 380-word passage about a village water-point committee. Part (a) asks candidates to explain in their own words, for two marks, why the committee introduced a monthly contribution. On marking, 21 scripts lift the phrase from lines 12–13 word for word. The language-structures section includes an item asking for the word for 'good' with the correct click letter and tone: eight candidates type '!gai' with an ordinary exclamation mark from a phone keyboard, and 14 leave the tone mark off altogether. Two markers disagree. One calls both spelling errors; the other says phones make the click letters impossible to type and that tone marks are a typographical nicety. The head of department must issue one written ruling before marking starts.
1. Decide how part (a) should be marked and justify the ruling by reference to what the two marks are testing.
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The two marks test different things: whether the candidate has understood the committee's reason (content) and whether the candidate can restate it (expression). A lifted clause can therefore earn the content mark if it genuinely gives the reason - for example, that the pump repairs needed money the committee did not have - but it cannot earn the expression mark, because nothing has been reworded.
So the ruling is: a verbatim lift that answers 'why' earns 1, not 2; a lift that does not answer the question earns 0. Marking those 21 scripts 2/2 rewards a skill the question did not ask for and inflates the whole section.
Because 21 of 36 is a class-wide pattern, not a candidate problem, the head of department should also record it in the item analysis and reteach paraphrase on the same passage, using substitution and nominalisation drills, before the next paper.
2. Rule on the eight '!gai' answers and the 14 missing tone marks, and explain how the ruling should be communicated.
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In Khoekhoegowab the clicks are consonant letters, not punctuation: ǃ and ! are different characters with different values, and the tones distinguish words that are otherwise written alike. On that basis '!gai' is a misspelling and a missing tone mark is the omission of a letter-level feature - the keyboard explains the error but does not make the spelling correct.
The defensible ruling is therefore: mark both as spelling errors, but apply the identical rule to all 36 scripts, record the two error types separately in the item analysis, and require candidates to use a keyboard layout that can produce the click letters before the national examination.
Do not invent a school-level exemption, because school marks must predict the national paper. Instead put the question in writing to the subject adviser: does the examinations directorate allow any tolerance for keyboard substitution? Tone marks should not be dismissed as decorative - they change meaning.