You will have recognized Exercise B as an example of an inappropriate task from the sample pre-reading exercises for Grade 8.  Now, however, given the maturity of Grade 12 students, this style of pre-reading could be productive -- if the teacher's curricular objective is to connect reading Draußen vor der Tür with previously known information familiar to Grades 11 and 12 from coursework in history and geography.  The teacher would want to work with instructors in these adjunct fields to insure that the presentation represented a reinforcement of English language learning rather than introduction of new concepts.  Assuming such groundwork (horizontal articulation) was undertaken, this pre-reading exercise could result in successful implementation of both connections and comparison standards

     Exercise A, however, also has merit.  If the pedagogical goal is to prepare students for the abstract or metaphorical nature of the first scene (and, indeed, the play as a whole), then Exercise A would serve well.  Its chief merits are simplicity and brevity.  One of the temptations teachers face in pre-reading is to "prepare" students by providing them with extensive new vocabulary that they are about to encounter in the passage to be read.  Instead of 5-10 words, teachers introduce 10-20 or even more, often in lists to assist students as they read.  To complete the task sensibly, however, a large word list may not be necessary.

     The caveats here are two. 1) More than about 7 or 8 new words place a cognitive overload on most students. They ultimately remember fewer words than if confronted with a more manageable number.  2) While vocabulary lists facilitate initial reading, they may ultimately lead to reliance on just such lists.  In other words, if our goal as teachers is to have students comfortable reading although not fully understanding individual words and phrases and, indeed, even whole passages of a text, vocabulary lists (and tasks that make such lists seem important) are counter-indicated.  Alternatively, since the teacher is always in the best position to judge what is most productive for his or her particular students, we suggest that an instructor who is more comfortable with extensive glossing or vocabulary lists can alter dependency habits by making clear from the outset that the class will be tested on passages that have no vocabulary aids.  In this way, students can be encouraged to reread until they no longer depend on glosses or vocabulary lists.

     To be sure, vocabulary acquisition is both a necessity for and an objective in reading.  The need for a base vocabulary or "threshold" of language knowledge for successful reading has strong proponents and an impressive research base.  The dominant research in vocabulary acquisition would seem to argue for glossing and vocabulary lists.  Our position is that research findings rarely have factored in the role of familiar context, text length, and number of new words that may be optimal to introduce.  We propose that the kind of grasp of context, extensive reading, and attention to 5-10 new vocabulary items that fits Standards goals is more useful than an exhaustive vocabulary list.  True, extensive glossing seems to yield short-term memory gains, and may make students more comfortable initially, but we question whether such gains are significant if students are reading a whole play and we question whether they are being prepared to read authentic materials without glosses.