Length: Semester or Full Year (students intending to study Stage 2 Japanese Continuers must successfully complete a full year of Stage 1 Japanese)

Recommended background: Satisfactory completion of Year 10 Japanese

Content:

In Stage 1 Japanese Continuers, students are expected to develop and apply linguistic and intercultural knowledge, understanding, and skills to:

• interact with others in Japanese to share information, ideas, opinions and experiences
• create texts in Japanese to express information, feelings, ideas and opinions
• analyse texts in Japanese to interpret meaning, and examine relationships between language, culture and identity, and reflect on the ways in which culture influences communication

There are three prescribed themes and a number of prescribed topics and suggested subtopics covered over the course of Stage 1 and Stage 2 Japanese. The three prescribed themes are:

• The Individual
• The Japanese speaking Communities
• The Changing World

Stage 1 Topics include:

• Personal Identity
• Daily Life
• Leisure
• Education
• Life in Japan
• Visiting Japan

Approximately 75 Kanji characters need to be written and recognised by the end of Stage 1.

Assessment:

Students’ performance will be determined according to the subject’s Performance Standards as outlined in the Subject Outline. Grades A to E will be used for reporting purposes. In each semester, students provide evidence of their learning through five assessments including:

• an oral interaction task in Japanese
• a text production task
• a text analysis task (listening or reading)
• a response in Japanese and one reflective response in English for an investigation topic

Each assessment type has a weighting of 20%. One assessment type (either text analysis or text production) will be assessed under exam conditions.