Mathematics Content

Comparison of the English and Nepali sound systems (6 marks)

1. Consonants

2. Vowels

• English has about 12 monophthongs (long and short pairs such as /iː–ɪ/, /uː–ʊ/) and 8 diphthongs; length is distinctive.
• Nepali has six oral vowel phonemes /i e a ʌ o u/ and no phonemic long/short contrast in speech, although the script writes both short and long signs (इ ई, उ ऊ). It also has a number of diphthongs (e.g. /ai/, /ui/, /au/).
• Nepali has phonemic nasalised vowels, marked by the candrabindu (ँ) or anusvara, e.g. /ã ĩ ũ ẽ õ/. English has none.

3. Similarities

1. Both have the basic stops /p b t d k g/ and nasals /m n/, and the fricatives /s h/, liquids /l r/ and glides /w j/.
2. Both use voicing to distinguish consonant pairs.
3. Both have front, central and back vowels, and diphthongs.
4. Both use stress and intonation to convey meaning and attitude.

4. Differences

1. Aspiration and voicing: phonemic in Nepali (e.g. /pal/ vs /pʰal/), not in English.
2. Dental vs retroflex contrast: Nepali only; English has only alveolars.
3. Fricatives: English has /f v θ ð z ʒ/; Nepali lacks them.
4. Vowel length and number: English has a richer vowel system with length contrasts; Nepali has fewer vowels.
5. Nasalisation: phonemic in Nepali, only a contextual effect in English.
6. Spelling: Devanagari is largely phonemic; English spelling is irregular.
7. Rhythm: English is stress-timed; Nepali is closer to syllable-timed.

Why native English speakers find nasalised Nepali vowels difficult (4 marks)

1. Absent from their mother tongue: English has no phonemic nasal vowels; vowels are nasalised only automatically when next to a nasal consonant (as in man, sing), so speakers have never practised producing a nasal vowel on its own.
2. Perception: since oral and nasal vowels are never contrastive in English, listeners do not treat them as different sounds and fail to hear the meaning difference in Nepali.
3. Articulation: a nasal vowel needs the velum lowered while the mouth stays open for the vowel, with no following nasal consonant. English speakers tend to add a nasal consonant (/n/ or /ŋ/) after the vowel, or to drop the nasality altogether.
4. No orthographic cue: English spelling has no sign like the candrabindu (ँ), so learners get no visual reminder to nasalise.
5. Result: the learner produces a foreign accent and may change the word or its meaning.

A Model Short Story (10 marks)

(Local characters and context; theme: one issue of the local community — drinking water scarcity)

The Queue at Suntali's Tap

Suntali Budha, a widow of sixty-two, lives in Dhungesangu, a small village of Ward No. 4 in Bajhang district. Every morning, before the first cock crows, she ties a gagri on her back and climbs down the steep slope to the only tap in the village. The tap, built years ago with money collected from the villagers themselves, now runs dry by seven in the morning. So the women of Dhungesangu have learned to wake up earlier than the sun.

One winter morning, Suntali reached the tap and found twelve women already in a queue, their gagris and baltis shining in the pale light. Among them was Parbati, a young bride who had come to the village only two months ago. Parbati stood at the end of the line, shivering, and watched the thin stream of water fall drop by drop. "By the time my turn comes," she thought, "the tap will be as dry as a stone."

The queue grew restless. Kamala, a loud-voiced woman, pushed forward. "I have to cook for my son who goes to school," she said. "Let me fill first." Gita, whose husband was away in Malaysia, shouted back, "And my children do not go to school? My old mother-in-law cannot even walk to the river." In a moment the queue broke. Women rushed towards the tap, gagris clashed, and water splashed on the ground. Suntali stood aside and sighed. "We fight over water," she said, "but the tap does not care. It gives only what it has."

That evening, the villagers gathered at the chautari under the old bar-pipal tree. Suntali's son, Birkha Bahadur, who had returned from the district headquarters, spoke to the crowd. "Fighting every morning will not bring water," he said. "Let us find out why the source is drying." The next day, the young men of the village, led by Birkha and Parbati's husband, climbed up to the mul — the spring that fed the tap. They found that the forest around the spring had been cut down for firewood and timber. The roots that once held the soil and saved the water were gone. The spring was slowly dying.

The villagers made a decision. They declared the slope around the mul a protected forest. No one would cut a tree there. Every household sent one member to plant utis, chilaune and katus saplings. They also repaired the old tank and laid a new pipe to a second spring that had been forgotten. Suntali, though old, carried water for the saplings herself. "I may not live to sit under these trees," she said, "but my grandchildren will drink from them."

Two years passed. The trees grew. The stream at the tap grew stronger. The queue still forms at dawn, but now there is no pushing. The women talk and laugh, and Parbati, no longer a stranger, fills her gagri without fear. When visitors ask how the village solved its water problem, Suntali smiles and points to the green slope above. "The water was never in the tap," she says. "It was always in the forest."

Moral: A community's problem cannot be solved by fighting over a small share; it is solved by finding the root cause and working together to protect it.

Effects of ignoring students' cultural knowledge in English language teaching

Nepali classrooms are multicultural. Students bring with them mother tongues, festivals, folk tales, songs, rituals, food habits, and local knowledge. When English teaching ignores or devalues this cultural knowledge, several negative effects appear in students' learning.

1. Weak foundation for new learning. English is learnt on the base of what the learner already knows. When the teacher does not link new English words and ideas with students' own experiences (dashain, tihar, chhath, losar, local fairs), the new content hangs in the air. Students memorise without understanding, so learning is shallow and easily forgotten.

2. Low motivation and interest. Lessons based only on foreign contexts — Christmas, snow, London, hamburgers — feel distant and unreal to many students. They find English boring and irrelevant to their lives. Interest falls, and with it attention and effort.

3. Silence and low participation. Students who cannot relate the lesson to their own culture hesitate to speak. They fear that their own knowledge, accent, or examples will be laughed at. The result is passive classrooms where only a few confident students talk.

4. Loss of confidence and identity conflict. When a student's culture is treated as inferior or "backward", the child feels ashamed of the mother tongue and local practices. This creates a conflict between home identity and school identity. Such students may develop a negative attitude not only towards English but towards schooling itself.

5. Weak comprehension of texts. Most English reading passages carry cultural meanings (greetings, food, family relations, humour). Without cultural schemata, students decode words but miss meaning. They answer literal questions but fail in inference and appreciation.

6. Poor vocabulary and expression. Local knowledge is a rich source of vocabulary building. If the teacher never uses students' own world as a resource, students cannot talk or write about their own life in English. Their writing remains copied and lifeless.

7. Widening of the gap between school and community. Parents and community feel alienated from English education. They cannot support the child at home, and the child loses a valuable learning partner.

8. Dropout and failure, especially among minority groups. Students from indigenous, Dalit, and minority language communities suffer most. English becomes a gatekeeper subject rather than an empowering one, increasing inequality.

Conclusion. Ignoring students' cultural knowledge makes English teaching artificial, demotivating, and unequal. The remedy is culturally responsive teaching: using local festivals, folk tales, songs, and daily life as content and context, allowing the mother tongue as a support, and treating students' culture as a resource, not a problem. Then English learning becomes meaningful, joyful, and inclusive.