Hints on Exercise 1, Task 2


     In performing this task, students will discover both similarities  and differences between German and US solutions to the coming computer crisis.  Both countries have to fix their bookkeeping programs.  However, only in Germany will they look to foreign programmers for cheap labor, or will the computers create a fictious 13th month in their bookkeeping programs.  Moreover, since German bookkeeping changed over to computers more recently than we in the US (where COBOL reached wide use already in the 1960s, as the text notes), they're in better position to "Auswechseln, nicht Flicken" -- to completely change programs used rather than to mend source code.

     Therefore, this task can easily be assessed in terms of culture and comparisons, depending on if the teacher stresses what is done in Germany (culture) or what is done in the two countries (comparisons).  Here again, assessing a successful reading outcome will involve correctly understanding the facts and perspectives of the L2 culture, whether in English or German.  That is:  it is a "better" outcome (expressed in English or  German) when students can note that Germans would rather buy new software than recode old software, than if they can say "Deutsche müssen ihre Computers ändern."  In other words, for the cultures standards, a good answer about cultural content in English should be valued more than a grammatically-correct answer in German that is culturally uninformative.


Exercise 1, Task 2