The Acquisition of German Modal Particles: A Corpus-based Approach

Following the rationale that corpora have an important part to play in fostering language awareness, this monograph investigates the use of spoken corpora in the teaching of German as a foreign language. Corpus-based research has had an increasing influence on language teaching pedagogy, with regard to linguistic content as well as to teaching methodology. While the majority of studies reporting on corpus-based teaching approaches refer to English, only a small number of studies have discussed such an approach for German. In this study, the exploitation of language corpora is proposed in order to arrive at authentic teaching materials which facilitate the comprehension of German modal particles, which pose numerous problems for learners of German as a foreign language. The approach is twofold: first, the frequency of those word forms which may function as modal particles is established. Secondly, concordance data of the more frequently occurring particles are analysed qualitatively. Teaching materials based on these analyses are developed referring to patterns of use which can be relayed to language learners in order to provide them with tools for the decoding of particle meaning.