AC9L2AU8EU01 Year 7 Languages

This Content Descriptor from Year 7 Languages provides the specific knowledge and skills students should learn. Use it to plan lessons, create learning sequences, and design assessments that align with the Australian Curriculum v9.

recognise and use modelled combinations of handshape, orientation, location, movement (HOLM) and non-manual features (NMFs) to form signs and phrases and demonstrate understanding of how these are represented in familiar contexts

Elaborations

• 1 noticing that in signed languages meaning may be expressed through either whole signs or through fingerspelling, with NMFs
• 2 noticing the variation in ‘handedness’ between signers in relation to both signs and fingerspelling: right handers using their right hand as their dominant (main) hand; left handers doing the opposite
• 3

  understanding that NMFs are a significant Auslan element, paralleling vocal inflection in spoken language, and can show emotional states such as a happy expression, or grammatical information, for example, a frown to mark a negative in

  LIKE

  and

  DISLIKE

• 4

  recognising and using signs with a change in handshape, for example,

  FIND

  or

  BEST

  , or a change in orientation, for example,

  CAN-NOT

  or

  HOW

• 5

  observing a sign's handshape and its orientation, for example,

  COCKATOO

  handshape:five, palm left, and

  SOCCER

  handshape:fist

• 6 identifying signs that can represent a whole object or part of an object, for example, body versus legs
• 7

  noticing iconic signs that provide visual images of referents such as

  DRINK, ELEPHANT

• 8

  noticing the 5 major locations of signs on the body (body anchored signs) or in space (non-body anchored), and identifying signs associated with each, such as

  SEE

  (head/face),

  SAY

  (mouth/chin),

  WHY

  (chest),

  PAST

  (non-body anchored, head signing space),

  HAVE, STOP

  and

  ONE

  (non-body anchored, chest signing space)

• 9

  noticing the path movement of a particular sign and identifying signs associated with the major types of primary and secondary path movements, for example,

  THROUGH

  (forwards) or

  FULL

  (down to up) – both primary movements; or

  WHEN

  (wiggle on cheek) or

  DINNER

  (tap on chin) – both secondary movements

• 10

  noticing that in a stretch of connected signing, a sign will often be produced differently from the way it is shown in a dictionary in terms of citation and non-citation form, for example,

  KNOW

  signed at the temple location, but in conversation this sign is often dropped into a lower signing space such as cheek, or even lower

• 11

  identifying which hand is dominant and which is non-dominant in 2-handed signs, and how such signs may move, for example, double-handed signs with same handshape move in the same way such as

  BOOK

  or

  DIFFERENT

  , while 2-handed signs have one stationary hand and only the dominant hand moves such as

  CULTURE

  or

  IMPORTANT

• 12

  noticing signs can have different levels of visual motivation or iconicity, for example, those that are fully transparent (

  SLEEP

  ), translucent (

  MILK

  ) or arbitrary (

  PEOPLE

  ), and that iconicity is often overestimated in sign languages

• 13 experimenting with different methods of capturing signed languages such as a dot-point script, hand-drawn pictures, videos and written gloss, and planning Auslan texts
• 14 shadowing a filmed Auslan story about an event in daily life, and copying signs and NMFs precisely from a signed text

Related Achievement Standards