One major difference distinguishes Exercises A and B.  Exercise A is based on the pattern of information and language use set up by the examples from Phase 3.  Exercise B is not.  Armed with the language and relationships established by identifying patterns in the text, the construction of paragraphs written in intelligible German will not be as daunting for a student to write or a teacher to correct when prepared this way as it is when the task comes out of nowhere.

     This claim is better illustrated than argued.  Hypothetically, the sequence of task results in a curricular sequence might look something like this:

die Frage	Was ich dazu tue oder sage
Ein Mann fragt, "wo ist unser Messingschild geblieben"	Ich frage, "was für 'unser Schild.'"
Er fragt, "wo sind meine Eltern?"	Ich sage, "ich weiß nicht"

The student writes:

"Heute kommt ein Mann an unsere Wohnungstür und fragt, "Wo ist unser Messingschild geblieben?"  Ich kenne den Mann nicht.  Die Wohnung ist unsere Wohnung.  Ich frage, "was für 'unser Schild?"  Aber der Mann antwortet meine Frage nicht.  Er will wissen, "wo sind meine Eltern?" aber ich weiß nicht.  Wie kann ich das wissen?  Ich weiß nicht, wer dieser Mann ist! "

     While the paragraph above is not elegant, it nonetheless expresses in German the content of the conversation with Beckmann from the perspective of Frau Kramer (communication standard) and expands on the "bare bones" of the information pattern the student has identified, thereby encouraging that student to make linguistic connections.  The Beckmann / Frau Kramer exchange is no longer simply a matrix of information that reiterates textual language.  It has become a short monologue, a first step in articulating a point of view in a foreign language (communities standards).  It allows the students to use language they are presumably familiar with from other contexts (the verbs "kennen" and "antworten," a modal verb + infinitive usage ("will wissen"), the use of familiar interrogatives ("wer" "wie"), and the noun "Wohnung" plus the compound "Wohnungstür."  Thus, this exercise asks students to draw on some language beyond that provided by the text.  It does not, however, ask for such extensive innovation that students will necessarily turn to an English dictionary to find adequate vocabulary to execute the task -- it can be completed essentially within the language resources of the text, within its world of culture and expression.

    Viewed from the standpoint of its demands for text-extrinsic language, Exercise B has many problems.  The most serious is that it asks students to undertake three different language tasks.  Moreover, the students like linguistic models for those tasks.  Thus, in this exercise, the likelihood is greater that students will not use German idiomatically and, since they will rely more heavily on an English language model in their heads, they will tend to make more errors than if using Borchert's text as their language model.

     Such problems will also have arisen in initial-reading tasks, when students were asked only for their subjective opinion, not for a viewpoint anchored in textual features.  In that context, however, they were practicing principally the communication standards, which focus on self-expression.  In contrast, the final segment asks for a sophisticated cultural analysis (Borchert's critique), a more complex task, both in terms of language (or rhetoric) and content, than the expression of a personal opinion.  In an exercise like B, students are being asked to do three things at once.  But even if separated, unless prepared for in earlier phases, none of these tasks would be profitable for Phase 4 at this grade level -- students would not be systematically prepared to generate connections or comparisons, and so the learning would be more haphazard.

     Note, too, that the more novice students are (cognitively or linguistically), the more explicit the preparation for this Phase 4 task may need to be.  If the language learning objective is to review adjectival usage, for example, teachers asking students for their opinion about Frau Kramer could prepare students by reviewing options and the rules for adjectival usage in German, reminding them how to build simple sentence as a list of assertions.  These would not, however, be useful for building an informative paragraph.  Typically, the sentences that resulted from this preparation might read as follows:

     In similar terms, an exercise that asks whether or not students would act as Frau Kramer did is problematic for this grade level because it necessitates the use of the subjunctive to accurately convey speculative probability in German, e.g., "Ich wäre freundlich zu Beckmann, Ich hätte anders gesprochen."  Regardless of age level, unless the task was undertaken in conjunction with work on the subjunctive, assignments that call for speculation in German are inappropriate.

     The third segment in Exercise B, asking students to comment on whether Borchert was criticizing German society, is cognitively too demanding at this level.  The question asks for synthesis of culture standards (assessment of behaviors and institutions) and comparison standards (the reader's norms for establishing a critical perspective).  Even when the class has advanced language skills and background concerning postwar Germany, this analytic task is too demanding for Grade 8 level.  Again, the language necessary to undertake such a task is extrinsic to Borchert's text.  It is not explicitly used in Scene 5 -- students would have to bring it to the text.  Consequently, they would tend to revert to English-to-German translation.