1st
L (F–10) 5_6
Understanding
Language awareness
- Elaboration 6
- discussing the diversity of Auslan users in the Australian community,
including people who are deaf, those who are hard of hearing and hearing people
such as CODAs and interpreters
- investigating the signed languages used by deaf and hard of hearing members of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities
- exploring variation in Auslan fluency among classmates and members of the Deaf
community, considering the relevance of factors such as where and when
individual users learnt to sign and whether they are from a Deaf or hearing
family
- mapping sign language use around the world using data from Ethnologue, for
example by identifying and labelling countries with correct naming of the sign
language used, such as France = LSF: Langue des Signes Française; Germany = DGS:
Deutsche Gebärdensprache
- finding representations of signing deaf people in the media or in literary
texts, and evaluating how they and the language are represented
- investigating the profile and distribution of members of the Deaf community,
for example across states of Australia or by age or gender, using data from
censuses and other sources to summarise and represent information in
graph/visual forms, and to suggest possible explanations of patterns or
statistics
- understanding the role and function of Auslan–English interpreters and Deaf
interpreters and the access and opportunities they provide to language users
- recognising that many languages are well-documented, strong, healthy and
widely used by many people across generations while others are less documented
and robust
- recognising that some languages have no written form and have historically
been passed on face to face/orally, which means that they are less well recorded
or documented
- recognising language documentation as an important means of recording,
maintaining, transmitting and revitalising a language
- understanding the nature of transmission of Auslan, for example, that in most
cases Auslan is not passed on from parent to child but from peers, or is learnt
by children from adults outside the family, and that some deaf people learn
Auslan later in early adulthood
- describing how Auslan has been transmitted across generations and how it has
been recorded, investigating reasons for the ‘oral’ tradition language
transmission
- using the UNESCO atlas to map the world’s minority languages and those that
are in critical endangerment and to document the vitality of signed languages