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Development of L2 Pragmatic Competence:. The Data-Driven Teaching of German Modal Particles Based on a Learner Corpus Nina Vyatkina Penn State University - University of Kansas, USA. German Modal Particles. “smallwords” ( ja, doch, denn, mal …)
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Development of L2 Pragmatic Competence: The Data-Driven Teaching of German Modal Particles Based on a Learner Corpus Nina Vyatkina Penn State University - University of Kansas, USA
German Modal Particles • “smallwords” (ja, doch, denn, mal…) • interpersonal attitudinal markers in informal conversations • “indicators of pragmatic competence” • “extremely important for the communicative teaching of German” • notoriously difficult to teach
Telecollaboration (TC)at Penn State (2000-2005) American learners of German and German learners of English discussing intercultural topics in both languages using email and chat
Corpus Telekorp: bilingual integrated learner/native speaker corpus (Belz, 2005)
Advantages of Telekorp • electronic data come from real-life status-equal interactions (not prompted production on a test) • no need for an external comparison corpus • materials from recognizable excerpts • longitudinal developmental data • marked-up corpus (over 30 learner and task variables)
Pedagogical intervention • explicit instruction based on • the analysis of data produced by the participants during • practice CMC sessions
Corpus analysis procedure • Automatic retrieval of words with an MP potential (ja, denn, doch, mal) • Manual disambiguation and tagging of MPs and their homonyms • WordSmith Tools (Scott 2001, 2005) • Dispersion plots • Concord • Collocates
Collocations of ja with pronouns, learners
MP Dispersion in the corpus • Learners: • ja • denn • doch • mal • NSs: • ja • denn • doch • mal
Results: mode/intervention effect * Statistically significant difference in mean relative frequencies (no. MPs/1000 German words), p<.05
Contributions to L2 research and pedagogy • a new method for data-driven teaching L2 pragmatic competence • drastic development shown to occur • new pragmatic features requiring instruction at advanced proficiency levels • corpus-based teaching materials • comparison data for future replications and related analyses