Hints


     Both of these pre-reading exercises focus on concrete facets of postwar conditions -- homes, clothing, injuries.  Of the two, you may have chosen Exercise B as the more informative and challenging.  For Grade 8 learning level, however, that is precisely its difficulty.  Unless a World History course is taught in the same year as this German course, or unless students can be assigned additional research, WW II will probably have little resonance with students at this age.  Even for adult students of the 1990s, WW II and, indeed, even the Cold War are relatively remote events.  True, newscasts and magazine have exposed students to problems of countries at war, but those images have involved warfare restricted largely to individual nations.  Lacking a sense of what global conflicts imply, these students will need a considerable amount of information to make meaningful generalizations.

     To render Exercise B a task effectively representing the comparisons standards, then, informational charts, stories, or pictures would be essential.  In other words, students would need to undertake a pre-reading that involves reading of supplementary material.  They might see a diagram that illustrates percentages of towns destroyed and people killed or they might be shown some pictures of devastated Hamburg or Berlin.  The caveat here is that such analysis would involve high level cognitive comparison of multiple features, many of them new or unfamiliar to American students.

     Exercise A avoids such cognitive and background problems by focusing more narrowly on the effects of war, a connections rather than a comparison goal.  If you rejected this pre-reading task in favor of the comparison asked for in Exercise B, you may have been concerned that an exercise asking for the effects of war placed a higher cognitive demand on students at Grade 8 level, because it appears to involve cause and effect logic.  Those demands are, however, more apparent than real.

     The task in Exercise A does not actually ask for more than very low level analysis.  Students need only generate lists rather than truly reflecting about cause and effect.  In other words, when told "Stellt Euch vor, es hat in Eurem Land ein Krieg gegeben.  Welche Probleme würde es geben?" they need only think about one type of situation--the aftermath of war, which they might even know from video games set in imaginary countries.  They are not being asked, for example, to compare differences among different occupation forces and their impact or analyze German military policies and their consequences for the immediate postwar situation.  Moreover, unlike Exercise B, neither the scope nor the particulars of the German postwar situation are asked for in Exercise A.

 Exercise A
 Exercise B
 Unit 4 Index