Connection Standards


     There are many ways that readers can choose to read.  They can, for example, look for the patterns of ideas and concepts in texts in order to compare them with their own, culturally-familiar schemata for such concepts.  In doing so, they are trying to forge connections between the text's culture and their own.  These connections build vital bridges between how the text presents concepts or information (as a pattern, based in culture, rather than as information bits) and how a reader recognizes patterns of culture.   To highlight this distinction, the Standards draw a distinction between language learners who learn to make connections and those who learn, for example, about German culture without reference to their own culture.

     In terms set by the connection standards, a reader has set a goal of connecting with the cultural patterns expressed in a particular text -- that is, to identify in what ways that reader can use a text to identify similarities and differences in behaviors, language use, activities, values, or responses to scenarios depicted.  The connection standards applied to reading, then, emphasize a reader's ability to learn about the German culture and its contexts by means of a text -- for instance, to reinforce and further that reader's knowledge of other disciplines or to recognize the distinctive viewpoints characteristic of a German-language culture.  This dynamic might be visualized as follows:

Connection Standards

contexts

(Goal:  understanding the L2 world,

in terms set by the reader)

reader-audience                       text            


     In this version of Standards goals, the reader-audience is less focused on their own performance as communicators, and more interested in the kinds of cultural knowledge that a text exemplifies.  Ultimately, however, evidence of that successful connection will be sought within the reader:   that he or she has, indeed, internalized more "things German" through the reading process, in a form that he or she can verify, confirm, or express to others.

 CULTURE STANDARDS
 COMPARISONS STANDARDS
 COMMUNITIES STANDARDS
 COMMUNICATION STANDARDS