Vandergriff, I. et al. (Fall 2008). Authentic models and usage norms? Gender marking in first-year textbooks. Die Unterrichtspraxis, 41(2), 144-150.
This article presents how gender is marked in first-year textbooks used in the German as a foreign language classroom. First, the article describes the movement towards a more politically correct language with gender-inclusive terms in German culture and how the grammatical gender in the German language challenges gender-neutral terms. Then, it provides a summary of “commonly used strategies to avoid gender-exclusive human nouns” (p. 145): German “speakers often use paired forms … such as Student und Studentin” (p. 145) naming both the male and the female form of a human noun to be gender-inclusive. In writing, there are a few options to represent these pairs in an abbreviated form: “the forward slash” (e.g. Student/Studentin, Student/-in, Student/in), “the capital I” (e.g. StudentIn), or the “capital R” (e.g. StudierendeR) (p. 145). An alternative to the paired forms is “neutralization either through pluralization of nominalized adjectives/participles such as Studierende, Angestellte or neutral abstracts such as Bürokraft or Lehrkraft” (p. 145). In this second part of the article, the authors also name examples for the usage of gender-inclusive terms in German speaking countries, e.g., “in administrative texts or job ads” (p. 145). Furthermore, they describe that “some parts of the public sector have developed usage guidelines” (p. 146) for gender-inclusive language. In the third part, the authors analyze seven popular first-year textbooks (Alles Gute, Alles klar, Deutsch heute, Deutsch Na klar, Kontakte, Neue Horizonte, and Vorsprung) to find out if and how these textbooks mark gender and use gender-neutral and/or gender-inclusive terms. For this purpose, they divided the gender marking into nine different categories (based on the common strategies for gender-inclusive language mentioned above): (1) pairs in reduced form marked with R or I, (2) pairs in reduced form marked with forward slash for endings, (3) pairs using full forms divided by a forward slash, (4) full form pairs as separate entries, (5) “lexical pairs” such as Großmutter/Großvater, (6) “deadjectival nouns,” (7) neutral plurals and abstracts, (8) “feminine-only forms,” and (9) “masculine-only forms” (p. 146). The results of the analysis illustrate a trend towards a gender-inclusive language. The textbooks show a “use of paired or neutral forms for over 90% of human noun entries” (p. 147). The most commonly used presentation of human nouns used (62%) is in morphological pairs that include both the grammatical male and grammatical female forms of a noun (category 3 and 4). Interestingly enough, no “orthographically reduced morphological pairs … occurred anywhere in the corpus” (p. 147) which the authors evaluate as problematic because said forms are frequently used in German speaking countries. By looking at two editions of the textbook Neue Horizonte, the authors observed a 15.12 percent increase in morphological pairs and a 10.55 percent decrease of masculine-only entries.
This article shows that gender-inclusive term are now conventionally used in many contexts in German speaking countries and that it is therefore important to introduce gender-inclusive human nouns to first-year learners. Moreover, the article is a good resource for those wanting to decide which textbook is best for their German classroom and also to inform themselves about the trend of including gender-neutral language in textbooks. Furthermore, knowing about the absence of orthographically reduced forms in all textbooks might inspire teachers to include authentic material that depicts these forms. The article is a helpful contribution to the analyses of textbooks. The authors, however, do not specify why they included the textbooks they analyzed and excluded some other first-year textbooks like Auf geht’s!. For anyone interested in how to use the human noun entries in the classroom and how to teach gender-inclusive terms, one should examine teacher blogs in which teachers present their teaching materials and look at the presentation and usage of human nouns in the actual textbooks.