The genre and language use in any text create a mini language world of word choice and intentionality.  Romance novels, for example, will present a world of feelings and relationships.  Readers can anticipate long descriptions of beautiful or frightening or inspirational places and beautiful people who may or may not possess character to match.  History books emphasize events and their origins in particular social, scientific, and geographical circumstances.  Ads offer an idea and what that idea can do for the reader.  Radio plays (Draußen vor der Tür was, we should not forget, written as a radio, not a stage play) present ideas that challenge their listeners' complacency and prompt those listeners to reflect about that idea in ways that can be entertaining or painful or both.

     While such an inventory is too extensive to complete here, these examples do illustrate an important premise about genres: they restrict reader options in ways that help a person with limited vocabulary and command of grammar make accurate predictions about language use that is unfamiliar or unclear to that reader.

     The reading phase we are about to enter with Draußen vor der Tür affords students the opportunity to read that world in five different ways and with five different objectives in mind.  The Standards that structure these choices are not, however, merely options for different readings. Their sequence is not random.  They reflect a cognitive and linguistic order of difficulty, each of which must be introduced separately.

Standards and Cognitive Difficulty
Standards and Linguistic Difficulty
Standards and Their Role in Developing a Curricular Sequence