German for academic purposes: developing a corpus-based approach for specialist learners

This paper describes an approach to teaching German designed for students who wish to acquire a reading knowledge of the language, specifically for research purposes, in the field of Ancient History where a large number of standard texts are published in German. A corpus of German academic texts was compiled to serve as a basis for linguistic analysis through procedures commonly employed in corpus analysis, such as compilation of word lists, frequency counts and concordances. While existing corpora of written German focus mainly on press and literary texts, a specialised corpus as proposed here may serve as a database for research into the linguistic structures particular to academic texts in German, notably in the domain of Ancient History. 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 contribution, the exploitation of language corpora is proposed in order to arrive at authentic teaching materials in the field of German for Academic Purposes.