English (Classes 6–9): Comparative Analysis of Punjab (PCTB), Sindh (STBB), and KP (KPTBB) Readers

Sources analyzed (all paths relative to extracted-text/):

Citation convention: “p.N” = the ===== PAGE N ===== marker in the extracted file (the Nth page of the source PDF), not the printed folio. PDF pages typically run 4–8 ahead of the printed page number; KP files additionally carry leading/trailing mirror-site ad pages. Sindh classes 6–8 are native text without page markers — those are cited by printed page from the running folio. KP watermark lines (perfect24u.com) and PCTB watermark fragments (NOT FOR SALE (PESRP), the interleaved N-O-T / FO-R / PC-TB / SA-LE column in the Punjab 9 native text) are extraction noise and are silently stripped from all quotes below. OCR typos in quotes are reproduced as found unless marked [sic].

1. Per-book unit lists

Titles in bold are verbatim from the book’s own table of contents or unit header. Titles in [square brackets, italic] are descriptive reconstructions: the unit’s title is rendered in the source as a decorative image that OCR did not capture, so the topic was identified from the pre-reading questions and body text. This affects KP heavily (see §6, Caveats) and Punjab Class 9 not at all.

1.1 PCTB Punjab — Class 6 (12 units)

Themes are printed alongside the contents (p.2) and follow the Single National Curriculum 2022 theme list.

1.2 PCTB Punjab — Class 7 (12 units + 4 Reviews)

1.3 PCTB Punjab — Class 8 (12 units + 2 Reviews)

Content list at p.3 gives units and themes.

Note: the printed content list at p.3 skips “9.” in its numbering — the row for unit 9 (Mountaineering) is present in the body but its contents-list entry is lost in the OCR’d layout. Unit count of 12 is confirmed from the body.

1.4 PCTB Punjab — Class 9, 2025–26 edition (11 units + 2 Reviews)

Aligned with “Revised/Updated NCP-2023” (title page of the native file). Full contents table recovered from the OCR file, pp.2–3.

1.5 STBB Sindh — Class 6, “My English Book 6” (6 units)

Sindh’s structure is thematically titled units, each with a fixed six-part internal spine (see §4). The unit title is a competency theme; the reading selection is named separately.

1.6 STBB Sindh — Class 7 (7 units)

1.7 STBB Sindh — Class 8 (7 units)

Production defect worth noting: the printed contents page mislabels unit 7 as a second “UNIT 6 SPORTSMANSHIP” and numbers its sub-sections 6.2–6.6, while the body header correctly reads “UNIT: 7 THE MULTIPLE ROLES THAT WOMEN PLAY”. The gender unit is thus effectively hidden from the table of contents.

1.8 STBB Sindh — Class 9, 2026 edition (8 units + 2 supplementary readings)

1.9 KPTBB KP — Class 6 (≈20 lessons)

KP does not print a usable contents list (the tables at pp.3–5 are decorative images). The sequence below is reconstructed from unit-opener pages.

1.10 KPTBB KP — Class 7 (≈20 lessons)

1.11 KPTBB KP — Class 8 (≈20 lessons)

1.12 KPTBB KP — Class 9, “Test Edition” (≈15 lessons)

2. Content selection: category shares by board

Each reading selection was assigned a single primary category. Grammar-only and letter-writing units are counted as “Skills”. Percentages are of all reading selections in that board’s classes 6–9. Boundary calls are unavoidable (a Seerah lesson used to teach tolerance is both religious and moral; Ibn-e-Sina is both religious-civilisational and scientific) — the shares below should be read as ±3–4 points, not exact.

2.1 What the shares mean

Punjab is the most religiously and patriotically loaded of the three, and it is loaded from unit 1. Every PCTB book opens with a Seerah or Sahaba lesson — Seerat-un-Nabi ﷺ (6), The Last Sermon of Rasoolullah ﷺ (7), Tolerance of the Rasoolullah ﷺ (8), The Saviour of Mankind (9) — and every PCTB book carries a second religious unit later (Eid ul Fitr, Eid-ul-Adha, Hazrat Umar ؓ, Hazrat Asma ؓ). Punjab is also the only board that puts military martyrdom in the English reader, twice in Class 6 alone (Major Shabbir Sharif Shaheed; A Poem by a Soldier) and again in Class 7 (Martyrs of Pakistan). Nishan-e-Haider appears in three of the four PCTB books and in only one Sindh book (a single passing mention in Class 9); it appears in no KP English book.

Sindh is the outlier on religion: its English reader is almost entirely secular. Classes 6, 7 and 8 contain zero religious reading selections — no naat, no Seerah lesson, no Islamic personality, no Eid unit. The single religious selection in the whole 6–9 sequence is The Last Sermon of the Holy Prophet (S.A.W), which opens Class 9 (unit 1.1). Sindh’s Class 9 “Role Model” unit chooses Shah Abdul Latif, a Sindhi Sufi poet — a regional-cultural rather than doctrinal choice, and the only board-specific literary figure any of the three boards elevates to a full unit. Sindh instead spends its space on health, safety, environment, careers and media: 43% of Sindh’s selections are science/modern-life, by far the highest of the three.

KP has the most world literature, by a wide margin, and the least gender content. A quarter of KP’s selections are non-Pakistani: Sindbad, Mowgli, Grimm’s Old Sultan, the Norse Why the Sea is Salt, Nasiruddin, Rumi, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, Joseph Campbell, Julia Carney, Otto Leland Bohanan, Charles Babbage, and a full unit on the Chinese New Year. This is a legacy of KP’s older curriculum base (see §4) — these are classic anthology pieces, not SNC theme-driven commissions. The cost is representation: KP has exactly one gender-focused selection across four books (Naseem Hamid, Class 7), and the female-to-male gendered-pronoun ratio is the lowest of the three boards in every class (§5.2).

All three boards are roughly equal on patriotism (14–16%) — but they mean different things by it. Punjab’s patriotism is martial and ideological (martyrs, Nishan-e-Haider, a unit literally titled Patriotism). KP’s is regional and geographic (Khyber Pass, Qissa Khwani Bazaar, a Swat camping trip, Pakistani handicrafts, biodiversity of Pakistan) alongside the standard Quaid/Iqbal pairing. Sindh’s is heritage-and-scenery (Mohenjo-daro-era civilisation, My Blessed Beautiful Land) plus one Quaid/Iqbal unit.

3. Shared selections across boards

Cross-board matching was done by grepping distinctive title words, author names and first lines across all twelve files. Overlap is much lower than in the Pakistan Studies corpus — these are three genuinely independent anthologies, and only two texts are common to all three boards.

Texts unique to one board (a sample, showing where each board’s identity lies): Punjab — The Lake Isle of Innisfree, Major Shabbir Sharif Shaheed, The Dear Departed, Pakistani Female Mountaineer, Snow Leopard and Markhor. Sindh — the Brazil/Ghana/Thailand diary suite, What shaped Edhi’s Life, Shah Abdul Latif, The multiple roles that women play. KP — The Strange Voyage of Sindbad, The Chinese New Year, Ibn-e-Sina, Nasiruddin, The Guest House, The Old Sultan, Why the Sea is Salt, The Madina Charter, The Fantastic Shoemaker, and the Vikram Singh self-introduction.

4. Pedagogy: curriculum base, SLOs, and exercise architecture

The three boards are working from three different curricula, and it shows in every page of apparatus.

Three consequences follow:

1. Sindh’s book is the most explicitly communicative/skills-driven. Its unit themes are competencies, not topics, and every unit ends in a game. The SPELT involvement is visible in the methodology notes, which read like teacher-training material rather than answer keys.
2. Punjab’s is the most tightly curriculum-mapped. Because SNC themes are printed against each unit, the ideological balance is legible on the contents page: a reader can see “Patriotism / National Pride”, “Gender Equality and Equity” and “Avoiding Social Evils” as designed quotas. This is also why Punjab’s coverage of themes is the most even and its texts the most obviously commissioned-to-order.
3. KP’s is the most traditional anthology and the most dated. Its 2006 curriculum base predates both SNC and NCP-2023; its Introduction still describes the book as a revision of an older edition “brushed up” for the 2006 curriculum. That accounts for both its strength (a genuinely literary reading list) and its weaknesses (no theme mapping, minimal gender content, minimal teacher support, and a Class 9 volume still marked “Test Edition”).

5. Language level and difficulty

5.1 Measured readability

Computed over prose-like lines only (lines of ≥6 words that are ≥92% alphabetic, with page markers, watermarks and exercise fragments filtered out). MSL = mean sentence length in words; poly% = share of words of 3+ syllables; FK = Flesch–Kincaid grade level. Treat these as ordinal, not absolute — OCR noise inflates sentence counts, and the filter cannot fully separate reading passages from exercise prose.

Three findings:

• Sindh has the cleanest difficulty gradient: 5.5 → 6.3 → 7.3 → 7.6, a near-monotonic climb of roughly one grade level every year, and the easiest entry point in Class 6 by a full grade level. This is consistent with a book designed around graded competencies.
• Punjab is essentially flat from 6 to 8 (7.5 / 7.2 / 7.0 — Class 8 is fractionally easier than Class 6) and then jumps sharply at Class 9 (8.8, and a poly% of 17.2, the highest figure anywhere in the corpus). The Class 9 book is the 2025–26 NCP-2023 revision; the 6–8 books are the older SNC-2022 set. The result is a discontinuity at the Class 8/9 boundary rather than a gradient.
• KP spikes at Class 8 (MSL 17.2, FK 8.7 — the longest sentences in the corpus) and then eases slightly at Class 9. This is a symptom of the anthology approach: KP 8 carries unedited or lightly-edited classic prose (the Grimm fable, the Sindbad voyage, the Babbage essay, Rumi), whose sentence lengths were never levelled to grade.

5.2 Gendered-pronoun ratio

Ratio of female-marked tokens (woman/women/girl/girls/she/her) to male-marked tokens (man/men/boy/boys/he/his) across the whole book. A crude proxy for whose stories get told.

No book reaches parity. Punjab’s Class 9 (0.86) is the most balanced volume in the corpus — the direct effect of putting Hazrat Asma ؓ and Women Empowerment through Stories of Entrepreneurship adjacent at units 4–5. Punjab’s Class 8 (0.37) is among the least balanced, matching its unit list: no gender unit at all. KP Class 9 is the least balanced book in the corpus (0.31) and also the only Class 9 volume with no gender unit.

6. Divergences, with quotes

6.1 What “role model” means in each board’s English reader

Punjab, Class 6 (p.43) — the role model is a soldier, and the lesson does not soften the death:

“During this fight, one of the enemy tanks fired at him, causing fatal injuries. He embraced martyrdom. At the time of martyrdom, Major Shabbir was just 28 years old. Later the Government of Pakistan awarded him with the Nishan-e-Haider.”

Sindh, Class 8 — the role model is a humanitarian, framed under the unit theme “HUMANISM”: What shaped Edhi’s Life. Sindh, Class 9, unit 2 — the role model is a regional Sufi poet, Shah Abdul Latif. Neither book contains a martyrdom narrative.

KP, Class 9 (p.92) — the role model is a local artisan-entrepreneur, The Fantastic Shoemaker, built around Zarin Gul, a Peshawar shoemaker; the comprehension question is “Why is Zarin Gul different from other businessmen?”

6.2 Global content: Sindh’s one unit vs. KP’s twenty

Sindh’s Class 6 unit 5, Knowing Children from Other Nations, is the single most globally-oriented unit in the entire corpus — three first-person diary texts from children in Brazil, Ghana and Thailand. From the Ghana text (printed p.81):

“I’m Kofi. It means Friday. I’m 10 years old and study in Grade 5 at the School for Deaf and Dumb Heroes. I cannot talk because I was born that way. But I am quite good at catching fish. … The Ghanans celebrate the Bakatue Festival for a good fishing year ahead.”

Note that this single passage carries both Sindh’s world-cultures content and a disabled first-person narrator. But it is nearly all of Sindh’s global content — outside this unit and the Helen Keller passage, Sindh’s four books are set almost entirely in Pakistan.

KP achieves the opposite distribution: global content is diffuse and constant rather than concentrated. The Chinese New Year (Class 8, p.118) is a full unit on a non-Muslim foreign festival, opening with pre-reading questions that explicitly bridge to the pupil’s own life:

“Can you name a few festivals of Pakistan? What is your favourite festival? How does your family celebrate…”

Punjab occupies the middle: its global content is exclusively literary (Yeats, Wordsworth, Kipling, Houghton, John Glenn) rather than cultural — Punjab teaches foreign authors, not foreign ways of life.

6.3 Religious minorities

KP Class 6 (p.173) contains the only named non-Muslim Pakistani child protagonist in the corpus, in a first-person self-introduction used to teach form-filling:

“My name is Vikram Singh. I am 8 years old. I live in Peshawar. My father’s name is Karan Singh. He is a businessman and has a cloth shop in Qissa Khawani Bazar. I speak Pashtu because I am born and bred in Peshawar but I am also fluent in Punjabi. I am a Sikh and a proud Pakhtun Pakistani.”

By contrast, the 14 occurrences of “Hindu” in PCTB Class 7 are all inside the Quaid-e-Azam unit’s Two-Nation-Theory exposition (“Views about Hindus and Muslims… that Hindus and [Muslims are] separate nations”, p.~39ff) — i.e. non-Muslims appear as a historical political counterparty, not as fellow citizens. Sindh Class 9’s nine “Hindu” mentions are likewise all in the Quaid unit, though framed positively (“the best Ambassador of Hindu Muslim Unity”, p.~86).

6.4 KP’s religious framing is comparative; Punjab’s is devotional

KP Class 9 unit 5 pairs The Madina Charter directly with The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in a single unit, teaching the 1948 UDHR text alongside the 622 CE charter (p.~52):

“The Universal declaration of Human Rights: … approved on 10th December, 1948 and made public. There are thirty points in all, a few are being mentioned here. … We are all free and equal. We are all born free. We all have our own thoughts and ideas. We should all be treated in the same way.”

No Punjab or Sindh English unit places an Islamic source text beside an international instrument this way. Punjab’s religious units are devotional and exemplary in structure — a Seerah incident, then comprehension questions on the virtue it demonstrates.

6.5 Gender: the same topic, three different framings

• Punjab, Class 7 (p.58) — individual female achievement, framed as national record-setting: “Samina Khayal Baig is the first Pakistani female mountaineer who created history by reaching the top of the 2nd highest peak in the world, the 8611 metre high K2,” with the lesson explicitly noting she climbed “on her own without his support, to present a message of empowerment to all women of Pakistan.”
• Punjab, Class 9 (p.~66) — collective economic empowerment: “Women entrepreneurs serve as role models for other women. By witnessing women succeed in business, younger [generations]…”
• Sindh, Class 9 unit 6 — historical and political: The Role of Women in Pakistan’s Creation and Development, under the unit theme “GENDER EQUITY”, with Helen Keller in the writing section (p.156).
• KP — one lesson in four years (Naseem Hamid, Class 7 p.152): “Can you name some female athletes of Pakistan? Is it easy for a female to compete?”

7. Notable findings

1. Sindh’s English reader is functionally secular for three of four years. Zero religious selections in Classes 6, 7 and 8; one in Class 9. This is the sharpest single divergence in the corpus, and it runs opposite to Sindh’s Pakistan Studies volume, which is ideologically conventional. The Islamic content that other boards place in English, Sindh appears to leave to its separate Islamiyat books (which, notably, Sindh publishes in English medium — stbb-sindh/class-*/islamiyat-*-en — while Punjab and KP publish Islamiyat in Urdu).
2. Punjab is the only board that teaches military martyrdom in the English reader, and it does so from Class 6. Three martyrdom/Nishan-e-Haider selections across Classes 6–7; none in Sindh or KP.
3. KP has by far the richest literary reading list and the poorest apparatus. A quarter of KP’s selections are world literature — Sindbad, Grimm, Rumi, Dickinson, Rossetti, Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, Nasiruddin, a Norse myth, a Chinese festival — a range neither other board approaches. But it is built on the 2006 curriculum with no theme mapping, minimal teacher notes, and a Class 9 volume still labelled “Test Edition.”
4. Only two texts are common to all three boards: the Last Sermon of the Prophet ﷺ, and Wordsworth’s Daffodils. Compared with the Pakistan Studies corpus, where boards converge on a shared national narrative, the English readers are three independent anthologies that happen to share a devotional touchstone and a Romantic one.
5. The Last Sermon is set three years apart across boards — Class 7 in Punjab and KP, Class 9 in Sindh — which means a pupil transferring between provinces mid-schooling could encounter it twice or not at all.
6. Punjab’s difficulty curve is flat then discontinuous (FK 7.5 → 7.2 → 7.0 → 8.8). Classes 6–8 are the SNC-2022 generation and Class 9 is the NCP-2023 revision; the two generations have not been levelled against each other. Sindh has the only clean year-on-year gradient.
7. Sindh’s Class 8 gender unit is hidden from its own table of contents — the contents page prints “UNIT 6 SPORTSMANSHIP” twice and numbers the gender unit’s sub-sections 6.2–6.6, while the body header reads “UNIT: 7 THE MULTIPLE ROLES THAT WOMEN PLAY”. A production defect, but one that specifically obscures the gender content.
8. KP Class 6’s Vikram Singh passage is the corpus’s only depiction of a Pakistani religious minority as an ordinary contemporary citizen rather than as a historical political counterparty. It is also, ironically, in the book with the weakest gender representation.
9. All three boards teach empathy with disability, and every treatment is independently written — but only Sindh gives it a unit of its own. Sindh 7 unit 4 is titled Awareness of and Empathy with Special People (selection: The blind boy), and Sindh 6’s Ghanaian diarist Kofi is a non-speaking narrator. KP 6 unit 2 builds a whole lesson round Naseebullah, a new classmate who cannot walk. Punjab has no dedicated unit, but embeds the same material inside Harmony in Society (Class 6, p.53), where two boys befriend Jasim, a wheelchair user: “When they dragged his wheelchair and helped him leave the house, Jasim’s mother was happy… People were looking at this differently abled boy but the company of Haziq and Ahmad didn’t allow others to say anything to him.” The pattern holds across the corpus: Sindh names its social themes as units, Punjab folds them into moral narratives.
10. Punjab is alone in teaching drama. The Dear Departed (W.S. Houghton) in Class 9 is the only full play script in any of the twelve books.
11. Punjab alone teaches no translation; KP and Sindh both do, and Sindh offers Sindhi. KP Class 9 sets “Translate the following passage from English into Urdu” five times; Sindh Class 9 runs a “Translation” strand at unit 7.3 in which every instruction reads “into Urdu/ Sindhi” (pp.~7546–7626 of the extract), including idiom work (“She has a sweet tooth”, “This news is music to my ears”). Punjab’s four books contain no translation exercise at all. The two boards that translate assume a bilingual-mediation competence; Punjab assumes English-only production — and Sindh is the only board in the corpus that treats the regional language as a legitimate target of school translation.
12. Sindh alone builds assessment into the pupil’s book: Model Test Paper I at the midpoint of Class 9 (p.102 printed) and Model Test Paper II at the end (p.203 printed).

8. Caveats

1. KP unit titles are substantially reconstructed. KP prints its tables of contents as decorative images, and OCR recovered only fragments of them; many unit-opener titles are also images. Roughly half of the KP titles in §1.9–1.12 are marked [bracketed italics], meaning the topic is confidently identified from body text and pre-reading questions but the exact printed title is not attested in the extract. KP unit counts (≈20/20/20/15) are therefore approximate to ±2, and the KP percentages in §2 inherit that uncertainty. Punjab and Sindh unit lists are attested from printed contents pages and are reliable.
2. PCTB Class 9 required two files. The supplied native-text file english-9-en is missing units 1, 4 and 5 entirely (image-only pages) and interleaves a NOT FOR SALE / PCTB watermark column through the body text, which corrupts line structure. The unit list in §1.4 is taken from the OCR file’s contents table (pp.2–3), cross-checked against both files’ body text. Readability figures for PCTB 9 in §5.1 are computed from the native file and therefore under-sample three units.
3. Category assignment is judgement, not measurement. Each selection got one primary category. Reasonable alternative calls would move several items — Ibn-e-Sina between “religious-civilisational” and “science”; Sports and Sportsmanship between “moral” and “modern life”; KP’s letter-writing units between “skills” and no category at all. The Punjab and Sindh shares are firm to ~±3 points; the KP shares to ~±5.
4. Readability metrics are indicative only. Flesch–Kincaid was designed for continuous prose; a textbook page is prose, exercise stems, glossaries and instructions. The filter (≥6 words, ≥92% alphabetic) removes most non-prose but not all, and it removes proportionally more from OCR’d files than native ones, so cross-board comparison of absolute FK values is weaker than within-board comparison across classes. The syllable counter is heuristic. The Sindh Class 9 figure is computed from OCR while Sindh 6–8 are native, which may account for part of that book’s higher MSL.
5. The gendered-pronoun ratio counts tokens, not roles. A lesson about a woman written in the third person and a lesson in which a mother appears in one sentence both contribute. It is a coarse signal and should not be read as a measure of the quality of representation.
6. Editions are mixed. Punjab 9 is the 2025–26 edition and Sindh 9 the 2026 edition; the Punjab 6–8, Sindh 6–8 and all KP books carry no printed date in the extracted text, and KP 9 is explicitly a “Test Edition.” Cross-class comparisons within a board are therefore comparisons across curriculum generations as much as across grades — this is stated as a finding (§7.6) but it also limits how much of the Class 8→9 jump can be attributed to deliberate levelling.
7. No Urdu-medium English books exist in this corpus, so nothing here speaks to how these boards teach English to Urdu-medium streams.
8. Passing mentions vs. full selections. In §3 the distinction matters and is marked, but the grep-based matching that produced the table cannot distinguish a full unit from a one-line reference without manual verification; every row in §3 was manually verified, but the underlying search may have missed shared texts whose titles differ between boards (e.g. a folk tale printed under two different names would not be caught).

Balochistan (BTBB) — a reader that turns religious at matriculation

Added 23 Aug 2026. English 6 and 7 are National Curriculum 2022-23 pilot editions; English 10 is National Curriculum 2006. English 8 and English 9 could not be found — see the coverage gaps — so the progression below has two missing rungs and should be read as three points, not a curve.

Religious content rises monotonically across the three volumes held, and open-opinion demand falls after class 7. Those two lines crossing is the whole finding.

Class 6 and 7 are unremarkable and, in one respect, better than most. English 7 sets five open-opinion prompts — the highest density in the Balochistan corpus — and, at p. 112, teaches the fact/opinion distinction with a worked local example. Named girl protagonists (Ayesha, Amina) carry passages rather than illustrating domestic roles.

English 10 is a different kind of book. A full unit of a language reader teaches the Prophet’s life, with the doctrinal formula “Hazrat Muhammad-ur-Rasool Ullah Khatam-un-Nabiyeen” repeated throughout and the pre-reading prompt “Who is the last Rasool of Allah” (PAGE 8). It carries the corpus’s familiar pre-Islamic Arabia framing — “Women were treated like animals. Ignorance ruled everywhere and in every sphere of life” (PAGE 9) — and the Makkah iconoclasm passage, idols “destroyed and Muslims started offering their prayers in the ‘Harem-e-Kaaba’” (PAGE 10).

And it examines it. The comprehension questions require the pupil to state the moral condition of pre-Islamic Arabia: “What was the condition of Arabs before spread of Islam?” (PAGE 11), plus keyed multiple-choice items on the same material (PAGE 12). This is the assessment-demand instrument firing inside an English reader, and it is why the board’s English 10 is the single book that corrected this project’s earlier claim that Balochistan examines the Indian-side material rather than the Arabian-side.

Cross-board placement. At class 10 the four English readers diverge more than at any other class: Sindh 0.3 religious tokens per thousand words, Punjab 1.1, KP 2.2, Balochistan 4.3. Sindh’s is the most secular English reader in the entire corpus; Balochistan’s is the most religious. Same subject, same year, four provinces.