Talking about German verb particles identified in concordance lines – from spontaneous to expert-like metatalk

ABSTRACT

Johns reports in his text “Kibbitzing one-to-ones” (1997) that corpus-informed metatalk with a foreign language expert helps apprentice writers to make progress in independent text revision. Expecting this progress to be based on the development of expert-like ways to observe language features, I integrated Johns’ so-called kibbitzing methodology into a German course based on the TV love story Weissensee. The course, offered to a group of French students, included online discussions focused on verb particles considered to be relevant for execution of the writing task, which was to invent a film script scene for the Weissensee series. The students used the specialised Weissensee corpus and the general corpus deTenTen as writing aids. Both were accessed through the Sketch Engine concordancer. This article outlines the way in which the students talked with their teacher about language samples retrieved in concordance lines or in the first drafts of their writing tasks. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data – the scripts of the discussions and the transcript of the filmed interview – provides the following results: the students got more insight into the semantic complexity of verb particles, and they got a better understanding of the link between content and form.

Keywords:

• metatalk
• concordancing
• language observation
• linguistic expertise
• verb particles
• German

Acknowledgements

I warmly thank Annette Hess and her agent for giving me permission to use the Weissensee film script for teaching and research purposes. I would also like to express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers who provided inspiring comments on a previous version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. ‘One-to-one’ means ‘one teacher speaking with one student'.

2. This corpus contains logbooks published by people practising an outdoor activity called ‘geocaching’.

3. The corpus management system Sketch Engine can be used by paying members only, but temporary access is possible through a 30-day trial option.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eva Schaeffer-Lacroix

Eva Schaeffer-Lacroix is a senior lecturer (maître de conférences) at the Department of Education of Paris-Sorbonne University, where she teaches courses in German as a foreign language, applied linguistics, and CALL. Her main research interests are corpus linguistics, metatalk, and writing in foreign language learning contexts.