Authentic Models and Usage Norms? Gender Marking in First‐Year Textbooks

Our study of seven first‐year college‐level German textbooks surveys how these texts deal with the challenge of representing gender‐inclusive language. Specifically, we look at gender marking in human nouns to see whether they occur as single‐gender forms (e.g., Student ), as morphological pairs in either full form (e.g., Student/Studentin ) or orthographically‐reduced form ( Student/in, StudentIn ), as lexical pairs (e.g., Großmutter/Großvater ) or as gender‐neutral forms (e.g., Studierende, plural ). All textbooks surveyed show a strong tendency to avoid gender‐exclusive forms but none introduces students to orthographically‐reduced pairs.