Das Lernerkorpus Falko

Using corpora to inform teaching practice in German Studies

“…A writing course was instituted in 2015 to teach students typical everyday academic German words and phrases (collocations/formulaic sequences) based on German mother-tongue corpus evidence. The phrases taught were adapted from those identified by the WHiG project ('What's Hard in German') , based on a comparative analysis of student writing in the UK, contrasted with a first language corpus of mother-tongue high school level argumentative German writing, FALKO L1 (Fehlerannotiertes Lernerkorpus/error-annotated learner corpus L1first language) (Lüdeling, et al, 2008). This method of language teaching had never been undertaken at Rhodes University before, and as such had an effect on teaching practice in the section, fostering an awareness of the importance of the role of collocation in language teaching.…”

“…The paper-based exercises were supplemented with an exploration of real-life mother-tongue German corpus data obtained from the FALKO L1 corpus, available under a Creative Commons license, and the freely available and searchable online parallel corpora, Linguee.de. 9 The FALKO L1 corpus (developed by Lüdeling et al, 2008) was deemed appropriate for our context as it was perceived as neither so large that it would drown the learners in data, nor so small that the instances for which we were searching would not be present. 10 Both the WHiG handouts and the FALKO L1 corpus were chosen for their high degree of relevance to the learning context, as they provide evidence of everyday academic German written by mother-tongue speakers of German.…”

The ALeSKo learner corpus

“…By this method, the overuse and underuse of certain words and structures by learners that "contribute to the foreign-soundingness of perhaps otherwise error-free advanced interlanguage" (Granger 2008: 267) can be studied. In order to explore to what extent the L2 phenomena correspond to the L1 speakers' language use and to determine the types of divergences that can be observed, the ALeSKo corpus has been designed as a comparable corpus: Its L2 texts have been complemented by comparable L1 German texts originating from the Falko corpus (Lüdeling et al 2008). Both L2 and L1 texts are argumentative essays meant to discuss the pros and cons of a given thesis, concluding with the writer's own opinion on the topic.…”

“…For reasons of comparability, the ALeSKo corpus has adhered to design criteria provided by the Falko project (Lüdeling et al 2008) and the ICLE project (cf. ICLE [online]), e.g., text type (an essential aspect of the metadata collected by Falko) and transcription.…”

“…Most applications of corpora for teaching have thus far been developed for teaching English as a foreign language (cf., e.g., Mukherjee 2002and Römer 2008. A discussion focussing on corpus linguistics and German as a foreign language was initiated by Fandrych and Tschirner (2007) in the journal Deutsch als Fremdsprache, and has been continued by a series of articles on various aspects of this topic (e.g., Meißner 2008 andLüdeling et al 2008). Walter (2009, 2010) propose a variety of approaches for the use of corpora in language teaching (for teachers, educationalists, and learners) as well as in language acquisition research.…”