Prioritizing Interlanguage Errors in German II Writing
Ms. Brandt teaches German II at a suburban high school with 27 students in her largest section. After Unit 4 she analyzed a 10-sentence diagnostic narrative, 'Mein letztes Wochenende.' Twenty-four of 27 students kept verb-second order in main clauses with a fronted time expression ('Am Samstag habe ich ...'), but 16 of 27 wrote subordinate clauses such as 'weil ich war müde,' with the finite verb in second position. Separately, 19 of 27 formed the perfect tense of 'gehen' as 'ich habe gegangen.' Five heritage speakers produced correct 'weil' clauses almost every time but still wrote 'habe gegangen' in about a third of attempts. The department pacing guide requires a unit test on two-way prepositions in three weeks, and the chair has asked teachers to document 'grammar coverage' in lesson plans. Ms. Brandt sees the class four times a week for 50 minutes.
1. Which error pattern should anchor the next two weeks of instruction? Justify your choice using frequency, systematicity, and communicative impact, and explain why raw frequency alone is not decisive.
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Both patterns are frequent and systematic, so frequency alone does not settle it. Verb-final order in subordinate clauses affects 16 of 27 students and is a rule that generalizes across 'dass,' 'wenn,' 'obwohl,' and relative clauses. It is also a site of negative transfer: English keeps subject–verb order in subordinate clauses, so 'weil ich war müde' is the expected interlanguage form, not a random slip. Auxiliary selection affects 19 of 27, but it is largely lexical. A closed set of intransitive verbs of motion or change of state (gehen, fahren, kommen, bleiben, werden, sein) takes 'sein,' and the rest take 'haben.' It can be taught as a memorized set and does not reorganize the sentence. The subordinate-clause rule therefore has higher instructional yield: one investment pays off across many structures and in writing quality. The auxiliary error is more visible in the count but is better handled as a short, recurring lexical strand. Anchor the two weeks on verb-final order, and run a five-minute 'sein/haben' warm-up three times a week so the auxiliary pattern is not ignored.
2. Design the three-week sequence so that the required two-way preposition unit still gets taught, and specify two assessments with their timing.
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Integrate rather than choose. Week 1: 10-minute noticing and sentence-combining drills ('Ich war müde. Ich ging nach Hause. → ..., weil ich müde war'), with recasts during oral work; collect a three-sentence exit ticket on Friday. Week 2: introduce two-way prepositions on the pacing-guide schedule, but write the practice frames so they embed subordinate clauses ('Das Buch liegt auf dem Tisch, weil ...'). This keeps coverage while recycling the target structure. Week 3: a 15-item quiz in two sections - eight sentence-combining items requiring verb-final order, and five items choosing 'sein' or 'haben' in the perfect tense - plus a five-sentence writing prompt. Do not grade the free writing for auxiliary choice yet; grade it for verb-final order and the two-way prepositions, so the assessment matches the emphasis. Re-administer the original 'Mein letztes Wochenende' prompt at the end of week 3 and compare the same students' error counts. That gives a clean pre/post measure and also satisfies the chair's documentation request without adding a separate test.
3. A heritage speaker, Lena, now writes 'weil ich müde war' correctly but has begun producing 'Ich war gegangen' in main clauses. What is the likely mechanism, and what is the appropriate instructional response?
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This looks like overgeneralization after noticing. Lena has correctly learned that 'sein' is the perfect auxiliary for some verbs and is now extending it to 'gehen,' probably because she has also stored 'ich bin gegangen' and is blending the two patterns. It is a developmental interlanguage move, not a return to zero. Do not re-teach the perfect tense from the beginning; that supplies more of the same input and may strengthen the overgeneralization. Instead, use a contrastive sort: give eight perfect-tense sentences, four with 'sein' and four with 'haben,' and ask her to group them by verb type, then articulate the rule ('Bewegung von A nach B' and 'Zustandsänderung'). Follow with a short oral recast cycle over two weeks. Because she is a heritage speaker, also check whether the form occurs in her family's variety. If it does, discuss register and audience rather than labeling it an error.