ACLFWU100

Elaborations
  • understanding the concept of word formation, for example, how a word changes meaning and form with the addition/change of a suffix or prefix to convey different meanings
  • constructing expressions referring to people, places, things and events in building and varying messages, using:
    • nouns and adjectives in phrases for people, characters, places and objects, for example, compound nouns, reduplications and nominalisations, adjectives used without an associated noun
    • sentences without verbs, for example, ‘this (is) my bag’
    • different types of pronouns, for example, personal, kinship, demonstrative and interrogative in all persons and numbers
    • determiners and quantifiers, for example, ‘some’, ‘every’, ‘other’, ‘few’, ‘much’, ‘all’, and words for groups
    • marking to indicate possession and other types of association, for example, ‘let’s go for water’
    • appropriate use of transitive and intransitive verbs
    • verbs of stance used in existential expressions, for example, ‘there is a creek lying near the road’
    • verbs to talk about actions, processes, thoughts and feelings
    • moods of verbs including statements, questions, imperatives, commands, intention, purpose, likelihood, reported speech
    • negation
  • expressing time, manner, attitude and place, using:
    • tenses, including past, present and future/non-past
    • temporal expressions, for example, relating to day–night cycle, lunar and seasonal cycles, ‘before’ and ‘after’, ‘soon’, ‘recent’, ‘long ago’
    • expressions of frequency, for example, ‘often’, ‘always’, ‘once’, ‘briefly’
    • sentence-level attitudinal particles, for example, ‘maybe’, ‘it is said’, ‘what do you say?’, ‘would you mind?’, ‘you see’
    • locational cases, for example, ‘in’, ‘an’, ‘at’, ‘near’, ‘besides’, ‘to’, ‘towards’, ‘from’
    • adverbs of manner, location and time, for example, ‘again’, ‘more’, ‘in turn’, ‘too late’, ‘as well’
    • structuring and linking clauses, for example, relating to coordination, subordination, embedding
  • understanding that languages are rule-bound and systematic
  • understanding that rules vary between languages, for example, in relation to word-building and word order at phrase and sentence level
  • making comparisons and identifying patterns in and between languages, for example, in relation to free and fixed word order, tenses in verbs, the use of affixes versus prepositions
  • noticing similarities between particular vocabulary sets in languages from the same region, such as words for body parts
  • developing metalanguage for talking about elements of language, for example, noun phrases, suffixes, prefixes, tense, transitivity