Each of the two exercises illustrates a different set of Standards (Exercise A = connections, Exercise B = comparisons).  Exercise A asks students to focus on verbal exchanges and, using the language of the text, describe them in the third person.  That cognitive task involves sorting verbal exchanges by semantic type (descriptions of appearance, descriptions of actions) and then distinguishing syntactically between what people say about themselves and what they say about other people.  The linguistic task for the students involves transposing observations made in the first person to the third person.

     Exercise B reduces these tasks linguistically, by focusing on only one speaker, but adds another cognitive difficulty that is text-external: transposing the concepts expressed by Borchert's Beckmann into an American context.  That cognitive task asks students to construct that alternative context off the model in Borchert's play.  A more productive intermediate step to introduce at this point would be that of having students first reflect about the culture of the text, in and of itself, before comparing its culture to another one.  Considering the cultural features of Germany after WW II involves comprehending new concepts as well as new vocabulary.  Consequently, that very act of reflection constitutes a challenging intermediate step before students move on to comparing the unfamiliar with the presumably more familiar American parallel.

     The major imponderables in Exercise B would be three.  First, students would need to have a fairly clear concept about the aftermath of WW II in Germany as the basis for any comparison.  Second, students would need to generate the vocabulary for a comparison with an American veteran from Desert Storm, conditions involving textual language about different physical problems, different appearance, and different styles of relational difficulties.  Since that vocabulary is not available in Borchert's text, they would need to be provided with a second, German language source (such as a magazine article on Desert Storm and its soldiers' experiences).  Third, even if they understand war, do they know enough about such large-scale military engagements to draw meaningful comparisons?

     Students will not consider some of these hurdles to be serious, if some of the missing material is treated elsewhere in their curriculum, even outside the German class.  If, for example, this lesson were preceded by one that focuses on the culture of postwar Germany (in a social studies or history class), they would be readier to turn to a comparison.  Therefore, it would be helpful to coordinate a comparison lesson with work in a social studies class dealing with contemporary issues in America.  In another case, the teacher would be assisted in assigning Exercise B if the class itself had particular interest in the topic due to, for example, its proximity to an army base.

     All of the above considerations suggest that Exercise B, while potentially worthwhile if undertaken under optimal learning conditions, poses considerably greater cognitive and linguistic demands on students than does Exercise A.

     In sum, when students are just beginning to read an unfamiliar German text, we advise teachers to apply the initial sets of Standards and wait until their classes have progressed through more scenes in the play before introducing the comparison and communities standards, because these ask students to produce new language and new ideas based on an analysis of several kinds of texts -- the German text read in conjunction with supplementary materials provided by their teacher or in adjunct classes.  A more productive sequence asks students to first reflect about the connections in and the culture of the text, in and of itself, before comparing its culture to another one.