Korpora im DaF-Unterricht: Einsatz im Schulbereich

Abstract

Corpora are electronic resources that students can use – in the context of data-driven learning – to explore language and clear up any linguistic uncertainties, by searching, for example, for frequent co-occurrences and collocations through a search query. Corpora serve as input factors (cf. Fandrych/Tschirner 2007) that draw the learners’ attention to recurring linguistic patterns (cf. Drumbl 2011: 67) and promote autonomous and explorative learning. This process also enables the development of language awareness (cf. Boulton 2010), which is a key element of multilingual competence (cf. Jessner 2008). The use of corpora is increasingly being integrated into university foreign language teaching but remains rather unknown in the school sector to date. This article explores how corpora could be used in schools and the extent to which students could work with them autonomously to improve their language skills and develop, over time, multilingual competence. To answer this question, a project carried out in an Italian high school specialized in the study of foreign languages (Liceo Linguistico) is examined and presented. The project took place in 2021 and required students to undertake several corpus analysis tasks.