These two texts present somewhat different problems in readability.

     Text P,  Heiner Müller, Der Vater (1958), is written in one- and two-clause sentences;  it begins with vocabulary drawn from the world of family and boys' games, then adds the fact of the father's incarceration  -- the words "Verbrecher" and "Lager," repeated several times in sections 2 and 3, become necessary to understand the change of scene in section 3 of the text that was anticipated in section 2 by the boys' comments.  Such repeated words specifying the major "who, what, where, and when" of the story will need to be familiar vocabulary items for almost any reader.

     The real key to understanding this story, however, is in a particular historical context. This father was "Funktionär der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands" (SPD) during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933).

     If the reader approaches this text without being sensitive to the date and the politics of the situation, the text will be a story of a family that is having a hard time because the father is a criminal. The reader might recognize the SPD as a political party, but may miss other political cues (e.g. 1933; the brown uniforms of the arresting "officers" who were probably not police, but Nazi functionaries).

     The story takes on another face if the reader knows that the SPD is a political party that emerged in Weimar in opposition to the National Socialists (the brownshirts, alluded to in the story) and Communists, a party that split after the Second World War to exist independent of each other in both East and West Germany. The story begins in 1933 and explains how this politically-engaged man lost his livelihood as the political winds shifted over time, and what happened to his family as a consequence.

     Knowing just the historical information in the two lines above, the reader is firmly placed in a different concrete cultural situation. The reader who makes an explicit tie of this text to the political oppression of Nazism is in position to make other language connections (e.g., recognize the brown uniforms). If the reader is informed about these historical particulars, the story is not the story of a criminal, but of a man who has been declared a criminal because of his political beliefs -- a much richer story than simply that of a dysfunctional family.

     To understand the sense of this Müller story, then, the average reader will need to be keyed to the fact that two situations are running parallel throughout the text: one about a family in hard times, and one about the political consequences of being in opposition to the Nazis. If that distinction is clear, then the competing sets of cues (dates from politics and events in the family life) begin to illuminate each other. An expert reader mature enough to understand the historical background of the story can connect that understanding to episodes in the text; the beginning or novice reader may easily make the mistake of overlooking one of these two sets of information, unless cued into them in advance of reading.

     Text Q, "Computer ohne 'Zeitgefühl,'" seems to present a very different challenge to the reader, because much of its vocabulary is less familiar (e.g., "Zeitgefühl," "Zeitgedächtnis," "Rechner"). To be sure, it also has many cognates or easily-decipherable compound words ("Computerprogramme," "Kalenderuhr"). Yet no text can be made readable simply by providing a wordlist for the novice reader.  A wordlist would only encourage a novice to try to translate it word-for-word instead of interpolating background knowledge into the text.

     In contrast to the Müller story, however, this text nonetheless has an advantage:  it is on what is likely to be a familiar topic:  the year 2000 software dateline bomb which is going to wreak havoc in the business world. The key to this text's readability is therefore not all the individual unfamiliar vocabulary items, but the familiar theme.

     To be sure, novice readers will need to be provided with 8-10 key vocabulary items to make paragraphs decipherable (just as they need, at a minimum, the terms "Verbrecher" and "Lager" to understand "Der Vater"). But the vocabulary can be delivered in a more usable form: in a parallel text in the students' native language.  Texts from recent popular magazines in both German and English frequently treat similar topics (for an example of an English article on the year 2000 software problem, read the article from the Chicago Tribune [22 June 1997: 1 & 6]).

     Texts from US popular texts on the year 2000 computer problem are amusing and breezy (with lots of anecdotes), where their German equivalents tend to have more solid blocks of text. Nonetheless, the English-language texts remind the reader of all the issues that "Computers without 'Time Sense'" will cause -- for Germans and Americans alike, and so treated in both languages' articles. Using a text in the native language in this way (as a prompt for vocabulary-in-context) not only helps a reader overcome deficits in language (especially vocabulary) when trying to read, it will also allow that reader to expand knowledge of other cultures and to facilitate comparisons and connections between these two cultures and languages. Individuals "reading" the German text in this way will be able to recapitulate the main ideas of the text, even if they cannot translate it (which is a very different kind of language mastery). This reader will also be able to use the text as a vocabulary and syntax resource to talk about computers (in one outcome, fostering the goal of enhanced communication), or to learn about the foreign culture as a different community, with different cultural expectations (e.g., the German computer firms are contracting their software repairs out to programmer-labor in Rumania and India, at lesser cost -- a totally unacceptable solution in the US, which has many more programmers who would fear being put out of work).