When Section A papers are read in isolation, they can appear idiosyncratic: a focus on jargon one year, sentence structures the next, Jakobson’s functions more recently. When read across time, however, a very stable assessment logic emerges.
The VCAA does not rotate concepts randomly. It cycles through a small, tightly controlled set of analytical demands, expressed through different surface features. What changes year to year is the linguistic lens. What does not change is the type of thinking required.
What follows is a year-by-year map of those demands.
2016: Register, control, and interactional purpose
The 2016 Section A paper is an early but clear example of the VCAA’s priorities. Students were required to analyse how language choices supported register and purpose in a spoken interaction, with attention to discourse strategies and interactional control.
What mattered was not identifying features such as turn-taking or topic management in isolation, but explaining how those features enabled the speaker to manage the interaction. This established a pattern that still holds: spoken language is assessed as purposeful action, not as a collection of traits.
The conceptual focus here was:
- register as situational alignment
- discourse features as tools of control
- purpose realised through the interaction between interlocutors, not content
2017: Identity construction through linguistic choice
In 2017, Section A moved more explicitly into identity. Students were asked to explain how language features contributed to the construction of persona or stance.
Although the features varied (lexical choice, syntactic patterning, discourse strategies), the assessed concept was stable: identity is constructed, not assumed. Students who described identity without showing how language built it were constrained. Students who linked features to social positioning were rewarded.
This year reinforced that Section A does not treat identity as background context. It treats it as an analytical outcome of language use.
2018: Coherence and information flow
The 2018 paper foregrounded coherence. Students were required to analyse how linguistic features contributed to the logical and interactional flow of a text.
Crucially, coherence was not treated as a checklist of devices. High-level responses explained how features worked together across utterances or turns to maintain clarity, progression, or interpersonal alignment.
This is an early example of a recurring Section A expectation: coherence is cumulative, not local.
2019: Register and audience awareness revisited
In 2019, Section A returned explicitly to register, but with sharper emphasis on audience and situational expectations.
Students were assessed on their ability to explain why particular language choices were appropriate given the communicative context. Responses that simply labelled language as “formal” or “informal” without justification were limited.
The conceptual demand was clear: register is not a label; it is an explanatory framework linking context, audience and purpose.
2020: Spoken language and interactional management
The 2020 Section A paper again foregrounded spoken interaction, including features such as prosody, turn-taking, and discourse markers.
What is notable is that prosodic features were not assessed descriptively. Students were required to explain how intonation, stress or pausing contributed to meaning, rapport or control.
This reinforced a key Section A principle: features only matter insofar as they do something.
2021: Salience and selective explanation
By 2021, examiner commentary makes explicit what had been implicit earlier: not all features are equally worthy of analysis.
Section A questions required students to select examples carefully and explain their relevance. Students who attempted to analyse everything often diluted their responses. Students who chose salient features and explained them well were rewarded.
This marks a subtle but important shift: judgement becomes assessable.
2022: Grammatical features linked to purpose
The 2022 paper included questions on tense and sentence structure, but Examiner Reports make clear that identification alone was insufficient.
Students who correctly identified past tense but failed to link it to purpose lost marks. This year makes the analytical chain explicit: metalinguistic description linked to a big idea.
The assessed concept was not grammar for its own sake, but grammar as a functional resource.
2023: Coherence as interactional logic
In 2023, coherence reappeared, but in a more demanding form. Students were expected to show how features worked together across a text to create coherence, rather than listing cohesive devices.
This year makes clear that Section A increasingly rewards integrated explanation. Fragmented analysis capped marks, even when individual observations were accurate.
2024: Precision under constraint
The 2024 Section A questions were tightly specified. Students were told exactly how many examples to provide and which features to focus on.
Marks were lost not because students misunderstood language, but because they did not meet the terms of the task. This year highlights that Section A is also a test of instructional literacy: reading questions literally and responding exactly.
2025: Explicit theoretical application
The 2025 paper is notable for its explicit reference to Jakobson’s functions. However, this does not represent a conceptual departure. It formalises something Section A has always required: linking language features to communicative function.
Students were not rewarded for explaining Jakobson in abstract terms. They were rewarded for applying the framework accurately to observable language use.
This confirms a long-standing pattern: theory is a tool, not the object of assessment.
What the longitudinal pattern actually shows
When the Section A papers from 2016 through to 2025 are read sequentially, what becomes apparent is not a rotation of unrelated skills, but a repeated testing of the same analytical operation, expressed through different linguistic lenses. Each year, students are asked to take a short stretch of authentic language data and explain how specific choices realise a communicative outcome within a tightly defined context.
This is why Section A questions rarely ask students to describe language in isolation. Even when the surface focus appears technical — tense, sentence structure, prosody, discourse markers — the task is always framed in terms of how the language is operating at the sentence, paragraph, and ultimately, text level. Students are required to show how a linguistic choice enables something to happen: how an interaction is managed, how a speaker positions themselves, how coherence is maintained, or how a purpose is achieved. Grammar is never assessed as form alone; it is assessed as a resource deployed in context.
Across years, register functions as the organising principle, even when it is not named explicitly. Students are repeatedly required to account for why particular language choices are appropriate to a situation, audience and mode. In some years this appears as an explicit register question; in others it is embedded in questions about coherence or identity. The underlying demand is the same: explain how language aligns with situational expectations.
Identity, similarly, is never treated as a background attribute. Section A questions consistently require students to demonstrate how identity is constructed through linguistic patterning. The exam does not reward students for recognising who a speaker is; it rewards them for explaining how the text makes that positioning legible.
Coherence is assessed in a cumulative way. Across multiple papers, students are asked to explain how features operate across a text rather than at a single point. This is why responses that list cohesive devices tend to be limited, while responses that trace how information is organised, revisited or progressed across turns attract higher marks. The exam consistently treats coherence as an emergent property of language use, not as a checklist of techniques.
Perhaps most importantly, the longitudinal pattern shows that Section A is a test of judgement under constraint. Students are not rewarded for analysing everything they can see. They are rewarded for selecting features that are salient to the question and explaining them with precision, within a very small word and mark allowance. This is why Section A differentiates students so effectively. It exposes whether a student can prioritise, focus and complete an analytical chain without excess.
Seen this way, Section A is not unpredictable at all. Its surface features change to prevent rote preparation, but its intellectual demand remains fixed. Students who recognise this stop chasing novelty and start responding methodically. They learn to read the question as an instruction, treat the text as data, and explain language as purposeful action under contextual constraint.
That shift — from feature-spotting to controlled explanation — is what Section A has been assessing for nearly a decade.
ATAR STAR and longitudinal Section A preparation
ATAR STAR prepares students for Section A by teaching these recurring conceptual demands explicitly. Rather than revising papers in isolation, students learn to recognise patterns across years and to respond to new texts using a stable analytical framework.
This approach benefits both high-performing students refining consistency and students who have found Section A frustrating or unpredictable. Once the longitudinal logic is clear, Section A becomes one of the most controllable parts of the exam.
If you want preparation grounded in how the VCAA has actually assessed Section A over time, ATAR STAR provides that clarity.