Resumen de Corpus-Based Teaching of German Compound Nouns and Lexical Bundles for Improving Academic Writing Skills

Marina Kogan, Anna Yaroshevich, Olga Ni

• This study highlights the problem of the lack of German specialized corpora for German for specific purposes (GSP) courses for engineering students and describes a project aiming at the development of such a corpus, the Kod.ING corpus. The authors show the relevance of the Kod.ING corpus in meeting the needs of Master’s degree engineering students at St Petersburg Polytechnic University who are studying lower-level German. At the preliminary stage of the pedagogical experiment, nine compound nouns and eight lexical bundles were selected from the Kod.ING corpus. These were taught to students through hands-on and hands-off data-driven learning (DDL) activities. The immediate and delayed post-tests proved the effectiveness of short DDL interventions in terms of acquisition of target vocabulary. The follow-up survey revealed students’ particular interest in hands-on activities with the Russian National Corpus (RNC). In conclusion, further research and pedagogical applications are suggested.