Phases 1-3 of the typical curricular unit, as has been described in previous units, focus on reproducing what thetext says -- its content and linguistic information.  Phases 4 and 5 differ not so much in task type as in the discourse type chosen.

     In Phase 4 of the typical curricular unit, students will focus on shorter discourses -- paragraphs only; they write only the shortest of genres in these assignments (paragraphs, short interchanges of discussion).  In Phase 5, students must work on longer genres (stories, essays, documentaries, plays), if they are to fulfill the highest levels of the Standards.

     In the first three phases, students move from comprehension into production.  These exercises in self-expression ask students for their views about issues.  In contrast, the activities in Phases 4 and 5 ask students to synthesize the language and issues of the text with a different cognitive perspective.  These differences will be triggered by the goal of the writing task and the genre or social voice in which that task is completed.

     If, for example, students write diary entries based on Draußen vor der Tür, their choice of vocabulary and discourse markers will vary depending on whether they write as Beckmann or as one of the people Beckmann meets, since everyone other than Beckmann has desires and wishes for things or experiences they can have in postwar Germany: Frau Kramer for "her" apartment, das Mädchen for Beckmann's companionship.  In contrast, Beckmann wants to return to the Germany he left, the Germany he lost during the war: his parents, his wife, his sense of honor.  Predictably, then, diary entries by Frau Kramer or the Director will defend their rejection of Beckmann as affirmation of their own survival ("Heute wollte Beckmann in meinem Kabarett spielen.  Aber ich konnte ihm nicht helfen, weil er ganz wild auf die Wahrheit ist").  Beckmann's entries, on the other hand, will be accusatory in tone ("Ich will nicht weiter leben, weil Frau Kramer kein Herz hat." or "Der Direktor hat mich getötet.").  Consistent control of these different voices will be a major criteria in assessing successful execution of such an assignment.

     Not only different authorial voices, but also the styles of spoken or written genres, in and of themselves, predict a particular style of language mastery.  Because each genre is directed at a different audience, genres such as, for example, a personal letter, a book report, or an abstract of a work, contrast with a diary entry or an informational oral presentation.  True, the audiences for each type of writing or speech change; each is a different speech act.  For example, the content and tone of a personal letter will depend on the person addressed in that letter: a grandmother, a child, a close friend, a wife or husband.  A book report can be written for specialists or the popular public.

     But the characteristic features of each genre will remain essentially the same: the personal address to another in a letter will contrast with the confessional address to oneself in the diary entry, the expository speech will not be argued using the contrast logic and rhetorical markers of a debate.  The third person summary of the book report will foreground representative details that the reviewer finds positive or negative about a work, whereas an abstract should present a neutral sounding summary of the main ideas -- the abstract may well be biased but must not sound that way!  These various genres are used in the various speech communities of a language culture, and they must be mastered by the truly fluent user of a foreign language.

     While similar in task type, the exercises created by teachers to move their students through Phases 4 and 5 in a curricular sequence can be distinguished with regard to theirscope.  Phase 4 exercises are designed for paragraph-length expression and for simple dialogues or question-and-answer sequences, while Phase 5 require at least one or two pages of creative, analytic, or expository writing, or the ability to assume and hold a position in rhetoric.  As will be illustrated in the exercises for Phases 4 and 5, creating shorter or longer spoken assessments of a text or texts involves more than the question of length in and of itself; each task requires students to produce evidence of their understanding of reading texts in new dimensions.  The scope of the task imposed by the teacher necessarily alters the degree of control a student must exercise over the language, content, goals, and communicative objectives of a task.  The creation of longer texts about longer or multiple texts read asks students to exhibit greater command of all these features than does the creation of shorter texts about single or short selections.  But again, the teacher must be careful not to tie all kinds of text understanding to one level of language proficiency (to one level of syntactic or semantic competence), since understanding a reading text involves understanding its content and context, as well as its language.

     The exercises in Phase 4 focuses on ways to use short-genre tasks in order to afford students opportunities to express not only the key ideas in a text, but the pattern of those ideas in their implications and significance, expressed in culturally-appropriate language.  Since these will be synthetic tasks, any one of the five sets of Standards may apply in an exercise and more than one set may be addressed by a particular task.

     Tasks for Phases 4 and 5 engage students in exercises designed to help them learn how to express ideas about texts by speaking or writing about them in extended discourse.  In other words, these tasks must be designed to enable coherent expression beyond the sentence level.  As assessments of textual ideas, both phases involve undertaking cognitive synthesis of ideas and information, Phase 4 is typically appropriate only for students who can write or speak about texts in coherent sentences of paragraph length.  Phase 5 is typically for students who can write or speak about texts in coherent extended discourses that are at least several pages in length.  Hence the examples given for both phases are intended for Grades 8 and 12.  Grade 4 students lack the cognitive maturity to engage in extended discourse at this cognitive level.

     NOTE: For Grade 8, Phase 4 and Phase 5 exercises presume a prior classroom activity or homework exercise in identifying key exchanges and information about the two figures in Scene 5 of Draußen vor der Tür, as exemplified in the last Unit, as part of Phase 3 of a curricular sequence.  For Grade 12, Phases 4 and 5 presume pre-reading, an initial reading (previewing), and the indentification of information patterns in the play as a whole.  Student answers from Phase 3 would have been corrected for accuracy of content and language, before the students have to move on to the more extended production outlined here.  Based on their corrected information patterns, students are told to utilize the same language when making their one- or two-paragraph answers to the typical Phase 4 task, and the longer ones for Phase 5.