Auslan – Years 1 and 2
Learning Objectives
In Years 1 and 2, Auslan learning builds on each student’s prior learning and experiences with language. Students continue to communicate and work in collaboration with teachers and peers through purposeful and structured activities involving signing and viewing. They interact in Auslan to share information about themselves and their immediate environments, using play-based and action-related learning. They may also interact in Auslan within their family and the Deaf community. In informal settings, students use local and digital resources to explore and interact with Auslan and signing communities in diverse locations. They continue to receive extensive support through modelling, scaffolding, repetition and reinforcement.
Students recognise key words and phrases, imitate language gestures, and use modelled language to communicate with others. They bring prior knowledge of signed language and gestures to the classroom. They create simple informative and imaginative texts that may include pictorial representations, words and short statements. They collaborate and respond to visual and multimodal texts that may include conversations, picture and story books, animated captioned cartoons, films and performances. They notice that languages contain words which have been borrowed from another language, and that there are similarities and differences between languages and cultures.
Achievement Standard
By the end of Year 2, students use Auslan to interact and share information related to the classroom and themselves. They use cues to respond to questions and instructions. They locate and convey key items of information in texts using non-verbal, visual and contextual cues to help make meaning. They use familiar signs including fingerspelling (FS), lexical signs, depicting signs (DSs), non-manual features (NMFs) and signing space, to create texts.
Students recognise and use the parameters of signs. They demonstrate understanding that Auslan has conventions and rules for signs and features of language. They give examples of similarities and differences between some features of Auslan and English. They understand that language is connected with culture and identity, and notice how this is reflected in their own language(s), culture(s) and identity.