Unit 3 has asked you to correlate texts, tasks, Standards, and outcomes. Although the sample texts in these units were authentic and written for several different German audiences, many could be applied to sample situations for Grades 4, 8, and 12 when keyed to tasks that fulfill the Standards. These applications, then, have suggested how the Standards can guide curricular development.

     Implicitly, the Standards address characteristic problems that teachers face when integrating reading into their German language classrooms:

     -What is the role of English in an L2 classroom? of German?

     -When should language accuracy be a chief concern in outcome assessment? What other factors should be assesed?

     -What can students do with texts that are too difficult for them to translate?

     The Standards address these questions by broadening out vision of reading as a language activity to include cognitive and cultural skills. That broadened vision is crucial to rethinking the L2 curriculum, particularly as it includes texts too difficult to be comprehended in their entirety.

     The Standards show us how to rethink the curriculum beyond the 4-skills model which has isolated skills from one another. The Standards integrate skills so that students can achieve other learning goals and move beyond the limits of the classroom. That is, speaking is no longer a question of correct pronunciation but redefined as an age-appropriate activity in a community, which includes socio-cultural as well as linguistic criteria. Listening involves knowledge of what is listened to in a foreign language culture (radio plays, political speeches, comedy routines, and other genres), as well as the ability to discriminate intonational patterns, phonemes, and dialect pronunciations. Writing is not simply a question of grammatical correctness, but rather a complex social task that inserts the writer into a cultural and historical community.

     The ability to read in the broadened ways used in these units is the hallmark skill in these redefined Standards applied to reading. Seen this way, reading joins the ability to comprehend orally or in written form, expression of others with self-expression. It offers examples of complex speech and language of a culture, documents its concerns, products, practices, and perspectives across age groups, sociolects, and historical eras -- in reading, one finds the library of a culture.

     Following the Standards will allow a teacher to move beyond language and skills based curricula to curricula that open doors to other disciplines and communities, integrating the learning of language into the general curriculum of the educated person. That is, teachers will be able to make language learning more relevant to their students' learning, because it acknowledges that learning a language offers the experience of becoming multi-cultural -- learning to join new groups, with different cultural norms, different patterns of self expression, and different concerns.