Hints: Text A


     Text A, "Männer -- Neue Väter, alte Chauvis?," is considerably longer, but may actually be easier to read, since it has fewer ideas and less varied language than that in Text B.  Text A has lots of redundancies, often built from words that characterize people -- vocabulary that most students see early on in their L2 studies ("familienfreundlich," "hilft zu Hause mit," "Mutti schaulkelt Baby":  all point to an idea of domesticity in the article).  By the time a reader gets to the subtitles that introduce the three interviews in the second half of the text ("The Conservative Man,"  "The Ambivalent Man," and "The 'New' Man"), it becomes quite clear what the general topic and point of view of the article is, allowing the reader to recognize in retrospect words like "Chauvi" as an abbreviation for "chauvinist," although that might not have been clear initially.  This text thus has several access points for novice readers (titles, interviews, true cognates) and a clear, repetitive logic.

     Often, as in this instance, long texts (over 1000 words) prove more readable than short texts (the 150-300 words favored in many textbooks) because they contain more clues to content:  more cognates, logical connectors, restatements, and sentences of varying length, a clearer point of view, or broader scale of information.  These differences can facilitate various ways in which the text can be understood by the average reader (or by a mixed group of readers, such as that in a class), even if the syntax and bulk of vocabulary in a long text initially seems more daunting.  A longer text may take more time to read, but the time spent may well yield a more satisfying experience for the reader.

     For an even more striking example of how a short text can be too dense to be informative, even if it looks at first to be fairly accessible in terms of vocabulary and syntax, see the following poem by Hans Manz (source: Duden Schülergrammatik). This poem relies heavily on a reader's sensitivity to social gender stereotypes and how they are constructed, but it does not provide readers with the language to discuss those stereotypes.



 TEXT PAIR 1, EXERCISE 1