Because it asks students to compare the world of the text with their own, the comparison standards focus explicitly on the symbolic power of language and the ways in which different social, economic, and political institutions use language to perpetuate their existence.  Whether comparing, for example, the social norms for high society in the United States in the 1990s with those of the pre-Civil War South or the acceptable ways each respective society allows its members to make money, marry, or enter into public life, student's must assess speech acts as social capital: how language use makes actions highly effective, marginally acceptable, or totally unacceptable in any given situation in that culture.  Thus, they must add to their inventory of explicit textual language a grasp of the intentions and discursive strategies that motivate different kinds of speech acts in that text.  In the first three sets of standards, then, comprehension of textual language was sufficient to comprehend the text and use it as the basis for expression.  To realize the goals of the comparisons standards, students must join textual language with language that expresses the readers' analysis of what that language implies about the institutions it reflects.

     The communities standards ask the student to enter the world of the text, controlling its speech acts for his or her successful use of language as a player in that world.  The difference in terms of learner tasks is illustrated in the difference between writing a letter to Scarlett as a person living in the 1990s or any person external to Scarlett's social milieu (comparison standards) and writing to her as a fellow Southern Belle of the period (communities standards).

     Or, to illustrate once again, a documentary can be approached from the stance of American values (comparison) or written from the viewpoint of a German, Austrian, or Swiss (communities standards).  This insider / outsider variant is the important task distinction between the two standards.  It can be applied to any genre common to both German and English: ads, book reports, abstracts, travel literature, novels, plays, and fairy tales to mention only the most obvious.

     The linguistic sophistication of both these tasks is equivalent but different.  To undertake either set of standards goals, students attempt to apply the complete inventory of moods, tenses, voices, and discourse markers of German.  Each demands control of a different speaker positionality.  To compare, the reader becomes the objective mediator between two linguistic and social worlds.  To join the German community, the reader becomes the "the other," the individual who attempts to function as Germans would, given the discursive world of the text.