The themes the course reads the text through, and the positions a student can argue about them.
These are the statements the Japanese Extension syllabus makes about Themes: Identity and Belonging and Tradition and Change. Dux records each one against the questions you answer, so you can see which of them you have actually been tested on and which have never been asked.
How the text treats the theme, and the argument a student can build about it from evidence.
The text's position on the theme, including where it is ambiguous or refuses a position.
Tension between inherited practice and change, and which characters carry each side.
Where the individual is pressed by the collective, and what the text says about the cost of conformity or refusal.
How the text handles recollection, loss and the difference between what happened and what is remembered.
The moral questions the text raises without settling, and how to write about them without moralising.
Who the text was written for, and what changes when a contemporary Australian student reads it.
Reading the text through a stated lens, and the limits of that lens as an explanation.
Who has power in the text's world, who does not, and what the text does with the difference.
Whose voice is heard, whose is reported, and how the text distributes speech and silence.
HSC Japanese Extension - Examination Shape is 50 marks in 90 minutes. Questions on Themes: Identity and Belonging and Tradition and Change are not one shape repeated: the command word decides what the marker is looking for, and the mark value decides how much of it. These are the ones Japanese Extension uses.
Dux writes practice for this module in exactly these shapes, so the drill is the same task the paper sets — not a general knowledge quiz with the module name on it.
Themes: Identity and Belonging and Tradition and Change is module 2 of 3 in Japanese Extension. Students routinely lose marks because a question spans two modules, so the neighbouring modules are worth reading next to this one.
Dux diagnoses Japanese Extension dot point by dot point, then writes questions in the shape this course marks. Written answers come back marked against the bands.