School Assessment: Building and Evidencing Your Auslan Skills
What school assessment actually rewards
School assessment in SACE Stage 2 Auslan (continuers) is where you demonstrate sustained communicative competence across the year. You must understand the three interrelated strands that tasks draw on: receptive competence (comprehending signed texts such as narratives, interviews, vlogs and announcements), productive competence (creating coherent signed texts for real purposes and audiences), and intercultural and linguistic understanding (how Auslan grammar, register, and Deaf cultural norms shape meaning).
Concepts to master
Know how handshape, location, movement, orientation and non-manual features combine to build meaning, and how spatial mapping, referential signing, role shift and constructed action organise a signed text. Understand register (formal presentation versus conversational), cohesion (how you maintain referents across a text), and text structure (orientation, complication, resolution in narrative; position, support, conclusion in persuasive signing). Be able to analyse your own and others' signing using correct metalanguage, and to reflect on feedback and improvement over time.
Traps that cost marks
- Describing what a signer said without analysing how they signed it (no metalanguage, no evidence).
- Ignoring non-manual features: eyebrow and mouth patterns carry grammatical meaning, and assessors notice their absence.
- Treating reflection as a diary. It must identify a specific strategy, evidence of change, and impact on communication.
- Losing referents: setting up a location once, then failing to point back consistently.
- Over-relying on fingerspelling for vocabulary you should know.
Rule of thumb
For every assessment task, ask: What is the purpose, audience and register, and which linguistic features prove I controlled them? A strong response names a feature, gives an example from your own signing, and explains the effect.
Worked example: In a reflective task, instead of writing "I improved my fluency", write: "I reduced role shift errors by establishing the two characters in contrasting signing spaces and holding each space consistently; my teacher's feedback noted clearer character distinction in my second narrative."