All assessment tasks make demands on what students know and the literacies they need to demonstrate what they know. Within secondary classrooms, the teaching focus has traditionally been on the delivery of knowledge or 'covering of content'. When students perform poorly on assessment tasks, it can reflect insufficient literacy skills to access the task and, therefore, complete the task rather than a lack of knowledge. An awareness of the literacy demands of assessment allows teachers to develop units of work that embed these literacies and develop strategies for teaching them. The possession of many literacy skills and practices is assumed; it is common to hear secondary teachers ask, 'Why can's students ……..?, What's happening in the primary schools? What are the English teachers teaching?' Because of a general lack of readiness amongst school aged students to transfer skills across contexts, all teachers are responsible for teaching the literacies that are being tested. However, failure to explicitly teach the literacies of any assessment piece ensures that literacies become the silent assessors of student learning. During this session the tools used to identify the literacies of assessment will be demonstrated.