HSC Spanish Continuers study guide
HSC Spanish Continuers · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Higher School Certificate (HSC) Spanish Continuers course is a Stage 6 language subject offered in New South Wales, Australia, for senior secondary students who have already studied Spanish and wish to continue it to a higher level. It suits learners with a solid foundation in the language - typically several years of prior study - who want to develop fluency, cultural understanding and confidence across all four skills. The HSC Spanish Continuers study guide has 6 sections and about 2,640 words.
01Listening and Responding in Spanish
Listening in the Continuers course is not a dictation exercise. You hear short exchanges, announcements, interviews and monologues, often twice, and must extract purpose, attitude, relationship between speakers and specific detail.
442 words, about 2 min02Reading and Responding in Spanish
Reading texts in the Continuers paper range from notices, advertisements and emails to articles, letters to the editor and short literary extracts. You are assessed on main idea , specific detail , purpose and audience , inference about attitude , and how language creates tone .
433 words, about 2 min03Writing in Spanish: Text Types and Communicative Purpose
In the writing task you produce a text of roughly 150–250 words in Spanish in a specified text type for a specified audience and purpose: an email to a friend, a formal letter of complaint, a diary entry, a blog post, a notice, an article or a short speech. Marks are split between communicative purpose and content (does it do the job, with developed ideas?) and language (range, accuracy, structure).
469 words, about 2 min04Speaking in Spanish: Interpersonal and Presentational
The speaking assessment has two faces. In the interpersonal conversation you respond to the examiner's questions and prompts about yourself, your world and the topic studied, and you are expected to initiate as well as answer.
454 words, about 2 min05Knowledge of Language Structures and Vocabulary
This domain underpins every other: the grammar and lexis you need to comprehend and produce accurate Spanish. The core structures are: verb morphology and tense contrast (present; preterite versus imperfect; perfect; pluperfect; future and conditional; present subjunctive; imperative; ser/estar ; por/para ); agreement of articles, adjectives and nouns, including irregulars ( el agua , el día , la mano , el problema ); pronouns - direct, indirect, reflexive and the order of clitics ( se lo dije , me lo das ); prepositions and verbs that govern them ( depender de , insistir en , acostumbrarse a ); and vocabulary range , including collocations ( tomar una decisión , prestar atención , hacer caso ) and topic lexis on family, health, environment, technology, education and leisure.
425 words, about 2 min06Knowledge and Understanding of Hispanic Cultures and Communities
Questions in this domain ask you to show knowledge of the Spanish-speaking world and to interpret cultural references in texts and audio: festivals, food, family and social customs, geography, education systems, music and current social issues. You are not expected to be an encyclopaedia; you are expected to understand references and discuss them in Spanish with appropriate vocabulary.
417 words, about 2 min