An Austrian Heritage Speaker and a Bundesdeutsch Rubric
You teach German at a high school with a large Austrian contingent. One student, Lena, lived in Graz from ages 6 to 12; her written German is fluent and confident. On the last writing assessment she used 'Jänner,' 'heuer,' 'Erdapfel,' 'Sessel' for chair, and the perfect tense 'ich bin gesessen.' Your rubric, adapted from the state Checkpoint B writing rubric, includes a criterion reading 'uses standard German vocabulary and structures' and directs scorers to deduct for 'regional or non-standard forms.' She lost 8 of 20 points on that criterion and came to you asking why, since her cousin in Graz 'writes exactly like this.' Meanwhile the department is fielding student questions about which German the new Regents-aligned exam rewards, and a colleague has told a class that 'Austrian German is not real German.'
1. Is the deduction defensible? Analyze the validity of the rubric criterion as written.
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No, not as written. The criterion conflates two different things: non-standard forms (dialect, invented spellings) and non-German-national standard forms. Lena's usages fall in the second category.
- 'Jänner' is the standard Austrian word for January, used in official documents, schools, and newspapers.
- 'heuer' for 'this year' is standard in Austria and much of southern Germany.
- 'Erdapfel' and 'Sessel' are standard Austrian vocabulary; note that 'Sessel' is the ordinary word for chair in Austria, whereas in Germany it means armchair - so a scorer applying a German-national norm reads a false error.
- 'ich bin gesessen' is the southern/Austrian perfect of 'sitzen' with 'sein.' It is standard in Austria; some northern-oriented prescriptive references label it regional, which is precisely the dispute.
Austrian Standard German is a codified national variety with its own dictionary and official status, not a dialect. The rubric's phrase 'standard German' is being operationalized as 'Bundesdeutsch,' and that substitution is the validity failure: the score now measures where the student lived, not how well she writes. This is construct-irrelevant variance, and it is serious enough that the rubric should be revised rather than merely re-scored.
2. Rewrite the criterion and explain the changes.
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Proposed replacement:
- Grammatical accuracy and comprehensibility. Range and control of structures; errors that impede meaning are weighted more heavily than errors that do not. No national variety is privileged.
- Consistency of variety. The writer sustains one standard variety of German - Austrian, Swiss, or German - and does not mix them randomly within a text.
- Command of an academic register. Appropriate formality, connectors, and vocabulary for the task.
The decisive change is the second row: consistency, not conformity. Lena writing 'Jänner' throughout is doing the right thing; a student writing 'Jänner' in paragraph one and 'Januar' in paragraph three has a real problem worth a deduction, because that is slippage, not variety. The third row captures what the original criterion was actually reaching for - academic register - and separates it from geography.
Retain a deduction for genuinely non-standard forms: dialect spellings ('i' for 'ich,' 'net' for 'nicht'), phonetic spellings, invented words. That distinction - standard Austrian versus Bavarian or Alemannic dialect - is exactly the one the original rubric failed to draw, and it is the one you have to teach students to make.
Re-score Lena's paper against the new criteria and document the change in the department file.
3. What do you say to Lena, and what do you say to your colleague? Include the honest answer about what the exam rewards.
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To Lena: her forms are not errors; they are standard Austrian, and the rubric was wrong. Tell her that plainly, because the alternative - leaving her to conclude she writes bad German - is the outcome that actually damages a heritage learner. Then give her the useful part: build a short two-column contrast list (Jänner/Januar, heuer/dieses Jahr, Erdapfel/Kartoffel, Sessel/Stuhl, bin gesessen/habe gesessen) so she can recognize both varieties, and be explicit that she should hold her Austrian variety consistently in her own writing rather than trying to pass as German.
Honest answer about the exam: state rubrics generally specify communicative criteria, not a national variety, and AP German accepts standard Austrian, Swiss, and German usage. But be candid that individual scorers can carry northern biases and that some published materials model Bundesdeutsch, so recognizing both is a practical advantage. That is a different claim from 'Austrian is wrong,' and she should hear the difference.
To your colleague: correct the factual claim directly, without an audience. Austrian German is a national standard variety, taught in Austrian schools and used in Austrian broadcasting and EU documents. Suggest they replace 'not real German' with 'a different national standard,' and note the practical risk: a statement like that, repeated to a parent, becomes the kind of complaint the department cannot defend. Raise it privately first; escalate only if it continues.