The nature of the learners

Children enter the early years of schooling with established communication in one or more languages and Auslan will be learnt as an additional language. Cognitive and social development at this stage is exploratory and egocentric; thus learning typically focuses on their immediate world of family, home, school and friends. Children at this level are learning how to socialise with new people, share with others and participate in structured routines and activities at school. Auslan will be learnt in parallel with English literacy, and the learning of each language assists with the learning of the other.

Auslan learning and use

Rich language input characterises the first stages of learning. The curriculum builds on children’s interests and sense of enjoyment and curiosity, with an emphasis on active, experiential learning and confidence building. In these years there is an emphasis on developing language to enable learners to participate in class activities such as storytelling and games. Creative play provides opportunities for using the language for purposeful interaction in a relaxed and informal context.

Children build vocabulary for thinking and talking about school topics, routines and processes. They build knowledge and understanding of Auslan by interacting with each other, the teacher and deaf children, and by participating in structured routines and activities. With support and modelling, they use Auslan for different functions such as greeting, thanking, apologising, asking and responding to questions, expressing wishes, likes or dislikes, following simple directions, and taking turns in games and simple shared learning activities. They learn to produce signed phrases independently using modelled language, for example by describing simple pictures.

Contexts of interaction

The primary context for interaction is the language classroom, with the Auslan teacher and classmates. Learners’ use of Auslan primarily relates to classroom routines and activities and to talking about their own life. Additional language enrichment may be gained through interactions with visitors from the Deaf community.

Texts and resources

Texts include filmed children’s stories and teacher-generated materials such as pictures or short descriptions. Learners watch live and filmed texts such as explanations. They respond to resources such as short video clips, or substitution or matching exercises, and produce texts such as conversations using formulaic language.

Features of Auslan use

Children in Foundation to Year 2 become familiar with all handshapes, movements and locations of single signs. They are learning to produce simple positive and negative statements with some time marking, and to use plain verbs or unmodified indicating verbs. They learn to describe familiar objects, animals or people using simple lexical adjectives and to depict the movement of people, animals and means of transport using an appropriate classifier handshape in an entity depicting sign. They are able to use simple handling and SASS depicting signs. They explore emotions through the use of NMFs, and begin to use NMFs for grammatical purposes in modelled language. They learn to use simple constructed action to represent the characteristics of a single animal or themselves or another. They learn the metalanguage of nouns, verbs and adjectives, and learn that signers can modify verbs to show the referents involved.

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.

Level of support

Support is provided through visual and tactile materials, such as pictures, objects and charts, and the use of gesture and modelling. The main source of support is the teacher’s talk, such as questions and statements, explanations, prompts, recycling of language, stories and feedback. Learners rely on modelled language and scaffolded tasks to create their own texts, for example, choosing signs to complete sentences or using pictures to sequence a story that has been told to them.

The role of English

Learners are encouraged to use Auslan whenever possible, with the teacher providing rich and supported language input. English is used as a medium of instruction and for explanation and discussion or in areas from the Understanding strand. This allows learners to talk about differences and similarities that they notice between Auslan and their first language(s) and culture(s), to ask questions about language and culture, to consider how they feel when they see or use Auslan.