To this point, the descriptions of the connection and culture standards have emphasized cultural content and information. The final two sets of standards emphasize two different relations:  contact between two cultures as contacts between two langauges.

     First, a reading emphasizing language use (word meanings, morphosyntax, discourse features, summaries that recreate textual point of view) or comparing one community of speakers with another lies at the basis of the comparisons standards.  Applied to reading, these standards emphasizes how a reader can compare the text's language and cultural patterns with those of that reader's first language in ways that yield insight into how language can mirror and manifest cultural difference. Whereas the cultures standards emphasize particular patterns of German activities and values about what is acceptable and what is not, or what behaviors prompt negative or positive responses, the comparisons standards focus on the actual language used to express these relationships -- the reader is brought to identify and compare how two languages express their hierarchies of intent and priorites in their selection of some forms and expressions in preference to others.

     This emphasis once again reorients the triangle model.  The text is considered to be illustrative of its language context, and is interrogated not for its own sake, but as coexistent with that cultural context.   No longer in the dominant position as a source of information principally about itself, the reader-audience and that reader-audience's grasp of their own culture establish a contrastive relationship.  No longer the "filter" for understanding of the relationships between products, practices, and perspectives of the German culture, the L2 text now exists as a message within a cultural context.  The reader-audience must compare that message with the products, practices, and perspectives of the L1 culture:

 COMMUNITIES STANDARDS
 COMMUNICATION STANDARDS
 CONNECTION STANDARDs
 CULTURE STANDARDS