English · Chapter 27
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
Family is a Language Development unit of the Grade 12 Compulsory English textbook. Its theme is the family as the first and most lasting social institution: what a family is, the forms it takes, the duties it performs, and how it is changing in Nepal and the wider world. The unit builds reading comprehension through an informative text on family relationships, develops a vocabulary of kinship and household life, practises a grammar point through sentence work, and asks students to talk and write about their own families and about family life in society. The notes below organise these strands in the order the examiner tests them.
The reading of this unit is an informative text on the family and family relationships. Rather than telling a story, it explains the family as an institution, and exam questions follow that explanatory structure.
The text first considers what a family is. In the simplest sense, a family is a group of people related by blood, marriage or adoption who usually live together and share responsibility for one another. Yet the text shows that this definition is not fixed. Different societies, and different periods of history, have recognised different arrangements as families, so the family is best understood as a living institution that changes with the society around it.
The text then describes the main types of family. The nuclear family consists of parents and their children living in one household. The extended or joint family, long the common pattern in Nepal, brings together grandparents, parents, children, uncles, aunts and cousins under one roof or in close cooperation, sharing property, income and duties. Alongside these the text recognises newer or less traditional forms: the single parent family, in which one parent raises the children; the childless family; the step or blended family formed when parents with children from earlier marriages come together; and households in which grandparents raise grandchildren, often because parents have migrated for work.