Grade 8 students are cognitively ready to read more from the text as their Standards skills are spiraled upward.  Even as beginning language learners, Grade 8 students can identify the text as a genre with which they are familiar (interview, fairy tale, newspaper article, etc.) and can search the text for redundant words and visual formatting that suggest for whom a text is written.  This age level is cognitively able to manage their voices in various social settings in English.  That knowledge can, in turn, be applied to their German language exposure.  Grade 8 learners possess sufficient cognitive readiness to apply ideas, even if they have little active command of German (as new learners).  Their teachers must be sure that active language command or lack thereof is not taken to replace age-appropriate cognitive tasks: students can, for example, practice making connections with or without the ability to communicate in German.

     Unlike those in Grade 4, Grade 8 students know that what they say at school and at home will change in tone, word choice, and as speech acts with specific intents.  Distinctions between polite and colloquial usages (preparing the "du/Sie" variation in German) are easily recognized by twelve- and thirteen-year-olds who are sensitive to the English use of "Ma'am" and "Sir" in the Southern United States, for instance.  The language that suggests formality rather than informality, demands rather than requests, or persuasion rather than neutral description can be appreciated by such students.  In this sense, Grade 8 students can begin to read for cultural content, to stretch toward practice of the culture standard.

     Consequently, if a play is the target text, Grade 8 students can read a scene with age-appropriate content to discuss the world depicted in that scene -- to assess, for example, how different voices manage the conversation (who decides what to talk about, for how long, in what tone and register).  A class of Grade 8 students can write variations on the scene, to help them appreciate and practice how differences in social status and situation alter interaction (see Unit 3, Grade 8 standards) -- to improve their language performance as discussed in the culture standard.  To communicate their reaction to the text or connect with their perception of what the text is about, Grade 8 students can also summarize content either verbally or in paragraph-length writing in journals or short assignments in which a topic sentence is elaborated.  These students can comprehend and articulate not only a topic, but also two or three amplifications of that topic.  To encourage such amplifications, adjunct readings in English or German, either in xeroxed form or found on the WorldWideWeb, are appropriate to introduce culturally contrasting ideas and expand on the themes and information found in the German target text.  These students can reach out more actively than they would have in Grade 4, as they practice age-appropriate language behaviors and learn about another culture.

Part 2 Introduction and Table of Contents
Unit 4 Introduction