Development of L2 Pragmatic Competence:

The Data-Driven Teaching of German Modal Particles Based on a Learner Corpus

Nina VyatkinaPenn State University - University of Kansas,

USA

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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

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Modal particles as ‘lexical emoticons’

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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

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Corpus

Telekorp: bilingual integrated learner/native speaker corpus (Belz, 2005)

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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)

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Pedagogical intervention

Data-driven instruction

CMC practice

QUAN & QUAL analysis

CMC practice

Data-driven instruction

QUAN & QUAL analysis

explicit instruction based on

the analysis of data produced by the participants during

practice CMC sessions

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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

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Collocations of ja with pronouns, NSs

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Collocations of ja with pronouns,learners

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Collocations of ja with pronouns, native speakers

Collocations of "ja" with pronouns, native speakers

15%

46%

39% I-pronouns

you-pronouns

Other

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Collocations of the MP ja with pronouns, learners

Collocations of "ja" with pronouns, learners

37%

6%

57%

I-pronouns

you-pronouns

Other

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MP Dispersion in the corpus Learners:1. ja2. denn3. doch4. mal

NSs:1. ja2. denn3. doch4. mal

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Results: mode/intervention effect

0

3

6

9

12

15

chat/pre* email/pre* chat/post email/post

Amer

Ger

* Statistically significant difference in mean relative frequencies (no. MPs/1000 German words), p<.05

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Relative frequency:each MP (post-intervention)

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

ja denn doch mal

Amer

Ger

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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