Most beginning textbooks, if they treat reading at all, have assignments that ask students for information from the text.  Readers may be told to guess at word meanings from context, but rarely do they receive indications about how different contexts set up different reader predictions.  Often, reading exercises ask students to find discrete points of information (in true / false, multiple-choice, or short-answer questions), but rarely do those exercises help students systematize that information into a meaningful pattern.

     Even in reading collections for more advanced language learners, the student is seldom asked to reread textual information for a pattern that links that reader's cognitive and linguistic objectives in systematic ways.  Yet precisely such links are critical if we want to spiral reading and have a German language curriculum that integrates foreign language reading with other skills.  Particularly the exercises in Units 6, 7, and 8 (Phases 3, 4, and 5 of the typical curricular unit) are intended to illustrate how careful sequential application of the Standards allows us to increase the cognitive and linguistic sophistication of our students in incremental, meaningful stages.

     In addition to rendering reading more meaningful and a more integral feature of the total language curriculum, then, teacher awareness of which tasks initiate which sets of Standards will help them design lessons that move from less linguistically and cognitively taxing to more demanding learning tasks.  Such sequencing has an additional advantage.  It prepares students for self expression based on a German-language model (the text) rather than an English-language one.

     An essay question may be based on a text's ideas, but unless the student has worked with the cognitive strategies that motivate language use in that text, essays about the topic of that text will necessarily be based on thinking in English and resorting to translation from English.  Unless the Standards are applied, students cannot learn how to use texts as the basis for different styles of language expression.

 Introduction to Exercises
 Standards and Cognitive Difficulty
 Standards and Linguistic Difficulty