Department of German

Linking Meaning and Form in Acquisition: Level I

I. General Statement

Writing tasks at Level I reflect the following characteristics, pedagogical intentions, and contexts of use:

They are relatively brief (1/2 to 1 page), relatively frequent, and directly tied to a particular theme/instructional unit in order to allow students the opportunity to practice, in a more controlled environment and with planning time, the structures and vocabulary they are beginning to acquire.
Because of their "rehearsal" quality and also their "summative" character with regard to a particular instructional unit these writing tasks often surround oral work, either individually or in groups, are part of the general classroom discourse, and occur in conjunction with more formal presentations. Because of the program's emphasis on literacy, they are also explicitly tied to texts (including web-based texts) that provide information about how activities of daily life and diverse cultural practices are handled in contemporary Germany. 
These tasks often exemplify very practical and highly circumscribed occasions for writing, e.g., information seeking and giving, personal narrative, matters pertaining to daily life and celebratory or recreational events which have certain format, register, and vocabulary use requirements, such as newspaper ads, horoscopes.

Both informal and more formal, public registers are appropriate for inclusion.

II. Language Focus

Overall attentional focus is located at and below the sentence level. So that students may gain writing practice for a variety of sentence-level features, the writing tasks themselves must provide for occasions to practice

- the major syntactic patterns of the simplex sentence, e.g., statement, question, command, with their word order rules for the key constituents of actor and action, time, place, and modality;
- the verbal paradigm in terms of agreement, tense/aspect, and modality (realis/irrealis at least in terms of formulaic behavior, as simple and as complex verbal expressions , including modal verbs);
- clause-level features, particularly case relationships between prepositions and nouns, between verbs and nouns;
- the central features of gender, number, and case for nouns as well as pronouns;
- coherence in terms of pro-forms;
- pre-nominal noun modification and beginning postnominal modification with relative clauses;
- expressions of time and place, differentiated by direction and location, and pre-, post, concurrent, future relationships in terms of an action or process and in terms of writer perspective;
- expressions of perspective, stance, author and audience position, humor, -- in short, creation of an author profile -- should be encouraged even at this point although it cannot be required.

While the focus of attention is on the sentence, the major syntactic patterns are inherently motivated by discourse contexts. Thus, a larger communicative purpose frames and guides language production at all levels.

Initially that larger context of communication is signaled through certain lexical items, e.g., adverbials such as deshalb, daher, danach. Increasingly, however, complex sentences take on this function, through various forms of subordination and their word order requirements. Complex constructions will naturally occur through writing tasks that involve sequencing and narratives, explanation, statement of opinion, making recommendations.

From the instructional standpoint, students should be guided to see that they can learn these features of language use in two major ways, from the formulaic, collocational and memory-based side and from and analytical side. This two-pronged approach suits different students differently. In any case, both are enhanced through performance in reading, writing, and speaking.

All three aspects of handling the formal features of language - accuracy, fluency, and complexity - are quite fragile at this stage and are given different weights, a fact that is reflected in the writing process itself. Modeling, explicit instruction and instructions, multiple drafts, focus on particular features in syntax, morphology, and vocabulary, all contribute to students' gaining a sense of themselves as intelligent and successful writers, even as their language use is fragile and susceptible to significant variation under different task conditions.

Process writing and revisions on the basis of feedback are central features of writing. At this level focused attention to the most central features of language use that are required by or are highly likely to occur with a particular task strongly influence the nature of feedback, assessment, and grading.

 December 7, 2002