SACE Stage 2 Chinese (continuers) cheat sheet

Weighting: school assessment contributes 70% of the final subject grade; the remaining 30% comes from the external assessment.

School assessment has two components: Folio (30% of subject grade) and In-depth Study (40% of subject grade).

The Folio contains three to five tasks, at least one of which is an interactive task (spoken or written exchange) and at least one of which is a text-production task.

Folio tasks assess the three strands: communicating, understanding texts, and understanding language; each task should target at least two strands.

Text types used in school assessment include recount, report, article, blog, email, letter, script of a conversation, and oral presentation; the text type must suit the purpose and audience.

In-depth Study: students research a topic connected to one of the prescribed themes, produce a response in Chinese (written, oral, or multimodal), and reflect on the research process in English.

The In-depth Study must be supported by at least three sources, and the source list is submitted with the assessment; the response is completed under supervision where required by school policy.

Performance standards in Chinese (Continuers) use five grades (A–E) with descriptors across the three strands; the grade is determined holistically from evidence across tasks, not by averaging task percentages.

Word-equivalent guidance for Chinese texts in school assessment is applied consistently across tasks so that difficulty is comparable with other languages; the school documents this in its assessment plan.

Weighting: the external assessment is 30% of the subject grade and consists of an examination in two parts - an oral examination and a written examination.

The oral examination is worth 20% of the subject grade and has two sections: a conversation (about 5 minutes) and a discussion based on the student's In-depth Study (about 5 minutes).

The written examination is worth 10% of the subject grade and is completed under supervised conditions; it assesses understanding of texts and written production in Chinese.

Written examination sections typically include responding to texts (short answers in English or Chinese as specified) and producing a text in Chinese of about 250–300 characters or equivalent.

Oral examination criteria include communication and interaction, content and relevance, range and accuracy of language, and pronunciation and fluency.

Written examination criteria include comprehension of information, ideas, and opinions in texts, and the ability to produce coherent, well-structured Chinese text for a specified audience and purpose.

The oral conversation draws on the prescribed themes and topics studied in Stage 2; the In-depth Study discussion requires the student to explain, justify, and reflect on findings.

Assessment design criteria for the subject are: communicating, understanding texts, and understanding language; each criterion is judged against grade descriptors A–E.

Prescribed themes include the individual, the Chinese-speaking communities, and the changing world; texts and tasks in the external examination are drawn from these themes.