Grade 4 students can learn vocabulary appropriate for later reading, but cannot be expected to engage profitably in reading more than individual nouns or few verbs in the present tense out of passages.  They will be able to use those nouns and verbs to generate descriptive sentences (see Unit 3, Standards in Grade 4) or to express their ideas.  In most cases, they can use texts as sources of material for their own purposes, but not gain a comprehensive sense of the text as a whole.  Yet as we have argued, it is nonetheless crucial for reading readiness that students are exposed to texts in the foreign language.

     Thus the communication standards best frame what should be Grade 4 students' entry level use of texts: texts are introduced as sources of ideas familiar to them that they hear and then communicate about in the new language.  This act of "reading" lets teachers familiarize students with how to use texts, and to introduce them into a cycle of learning that will spiral upward as they grow.  Often, such a curricular objective means that, at the Grade 4 level, "reading" remains largely at the pre-reading level.  The text to be recycled at upper levels in the curriculum with tasks that spiral students' abilities upwards may thus not be actually read at all (by conventional definitions) in Grade 4; some student groups may read excerpts or paragraphs rather than the whole text.  Nonetheless, the connections standards may also apply in these early phases, as when, for example, students link German language concepts and values to the text's familiar descriptors.  In this sense, these standards are fulfilled by pre-reading activities.

     A pre-reading task that can foster production for the communication standards might, for example, ask Grade 4 students to respond to commands or dialogues that use age-appropriate nouns and verbs from the target text.  Students could, with respect to several of the illustrative texts in Part 1, Unit 1, write short descriptive compositions of rabbits or comets, what their Daddies do to help Mama, or what they do on vacation; they can hear about German variations as the teacher tells them what is in German texts, or find the words they need in a text they are using without really "reading."

     Both comprehension and production tasks for early grades' practice of tasks fostering communication and connections standards thus involve basic language reproduction.  They avoid the cognitive and linguistic complexities necessary for older students to learn, such as comparing the German and the American families or projecting themselves into the German community.  Grade 4 students are generally cognitively able to identify the origin of a German language text as "not here" or "different from the way we do things," but not generally to use that knowledge productively.  In other words, they will be able to reproduce or discuss individual topics but not to analyze them or recreate them in terms other than "not what we do."  Consequently, their reading tasks will, under most conditions, foster primarily the kinds of learning highlighted in the communication and connections standards.

Part 2 Introduction and Table of Contents
Unit 4 Introduction