Application of corpus-based technologies in the formation of lexical and grammatical skills in German

Abstract

Introduction. The introduction of information technologies into the educational process is an integral part of the successful work of the teacher and the achievement of learning objectives; therefore, the use of text corpora and corpus technologies as a means of supporting the foreign language teaching is one of the urgent trends of improving the teaching methods. The purpose of the study is to provide a theoretical justification, develop a set of tasks and practical confirmation of the effectiveness of the methodology for the formation of lexical and grammatical skills of students in German based on the corpus-based technologies. Materials and methods. The German corpora such as the Leipzig Corpus of Modern German (Wortschatz Universität Leipzig) and the German corpus DWDS (Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache) were used as the authentic sources for compiling the set of tasks. In particular, the program QuAX-DaF (Quantitative Analyze von TeXten für Deutsch als Fremdsprache), which provides the statistical text processing, was used. 60 students of the 3rd-4th courses of Kazan Federal University, studying in the field of study “Pedagogical Education (with two educational program specializations)” (Bachelor’s degree), took part in the pedagogical experiment. The Welch’s test was used to establish the statistically significant differences between the experimental and control groups. Study results. As a result of the study, a set of tasks for the formation of lexical and grammatical skills was created and introduced into the educational process. The conducted pedagogical experiment confirms the effectiveness of the inclusion of corpus technologies in the formation of lexical and grammatical skills of students (t = 1.11; p≤0.05). After classes using materials that include working with concordance, building a lexical / collocation profile of a word with the subsequent compilation of a thematic dictionary, the number of students with a high level of formation of lexical and grammatical skills increased by 6%, with an average level – improved by 7%, and with a low level – decreased by 13%. Conclusions. The results of the study contribute to the development of the corpus-based linguodidactics; the set of developed tasks may become an incentive for more intensive use of corpus-based technologies in foreign language teaching.