The nature of the learners

Most hearing children, or deaf children from signing families, enter the early years of schooling with established communication in one or more languages. Cognitive and social development at this stage is exploratory and egocentric; thus learning typically focuses on students’ immediate world of family, home, school and friends. Children at this age are learning how to socialise with new people, share with others, and participate in structured routines and activities at school. Auslan is learnt in parallel with English literacy and, for some children, spoken English. Some learners arrive at school with little experience of English and will learn it as a second language, while others may use spoken English with their hearing family members. The learning of Auslan supports and enriches deaf children’s learning of English and vice versa.

Auslan learning and use

Rich language input characterises the first stages of learning. Most children are familiar with the forms of signs and their fluency and accuracy is further developed through activities such as play, games and viewing texts. The curriculum builds on children’s interests and sense of enjoyment and curiosity, with an emphasis on active, experiential learning and confidence building. Creative play provides opportunities for using the language for purposeful interaction in less familiar contexts.

Children build vocabulary for thinking and talking about school topics, routines and processes, and expand their knowledge and understanding by interacting with other deaf children and adults in new contexts and by participating in more structured routines and activities. They use Auslan for different language functions, such as asking and responding to questions, expressing wishes, responding to and giving directions, greeting, thanking, apologising, agreeing and disagreeing, and taking turns in games and simple shared learning activities.

Contexts of interaction

Across Foundation to Year 2, learning occurs largely through interaction with peers and the teaching team, with some access to members of the Deaf community for additional enrichment and authentication of students’ language learning. Information and communication technology (ICT) resources provide additional access to Auslan and to the cultural experience of deafness. A key expectation in the L1 pathway is that students will have opportunities to interact with a variety of native or near-native signing models.

Texts and resources

Children engage with a variety of signed texts, live and recorded. They watch the teacher signing, share ideas and join in activities and stories and various forms of play and conversational exchanges. Text types include descriptions of appearances, relationships between people, and stories and recounts, as well as texts that talk about self, such as comparing likes and dislikes with others. Students become familiar with ways of recording Auslan, either through film, photos of signs, line drawings of signs, or simple symbols. An important source of natural signed texts are members of the deaf community. The early stage of language learning is also supported by extensive use of concrete materials and resources. Play and imaginative activities, games, and familiar routines provide essential scaffolding and context for language development.

Features of Auslan use

Children in Foundation to Year 2 learn to produce all handshapes, movements and locations of single signs. They make use of handling and size and shape specifiers (SASS) depicting signs with increasing accuracy, and use entity depicting signs to talk about simple movement and locations. Children in this band level produce a range of clause structures with the correct sign order and non-manual features (NMFs), such as questions, negatives and topic-comment structures, as well as using a range of non-manual adverbs. They learn to modify indicating verbs to show participants involved in events and can sometimes maintain those locations across multiple clauses. They are learning to integrate multiple viewpoints, such as that of narrator and of one or two characters, through constructed action and marking manner in longer signed texts.

As children learn to adjust their language to suit different purposes and situations, they begin to understand how culture shapes language use. They compare how they feel when they use different languages and how they view different languages and people who use them. This introduction to the meta dimension of intercultural learning develops the ability to ‘decentre’, to consider different perspectives and ways of being, and to become aware of themselves as communicators and cultural participants. Metalinguistically, children learn to describe features of signs, such as handshapes, to identify whether they are iconic; to recognise the importance of space in Auslan; and to categorise signs as nouns, verbs and adjectives.

Level of support

Learning is supported through the provision of experiences that are challenging but achievable with appropriate scaffolding and support. This involves modelling, monitoring and moderating by the teacher; provision of multiple and varied sources of input; opportunities for revisiting, recycling and reviewing; and continuous cueing, feedback, response and encouragement. Use of recounting, experiencing and retelling assists in establishing early language skills based on real-life experiences.

The role of English

Auslan is the language of all classroom interactions, routines and activities. It is the principal medium of instruction in L1 pathway classrooms. English may play a complementary role, such as when comparing signs and words and looking at fingerspelling. English is necessarily discussed in the translating strand.