On the selection of idioms for didactic purposes using the example of the PhraseoLab project

Against the background of recent research approaches in linguistics (corpus linguistics, construction grammar, cognitive linguistics), phraseological competence is increasingly perceived as an indispensable component of communicative competence in foreign languages. Nevertheless, multiword units are treated unsystematically, have a marginal position in learning materials for German as a foreign language (Jesensek 2006:137ff.; 2007:20) and their selection is often intuitive and empirically unsubstantiated. The international project PhraseoLab Plurilingual Phraseology: Learning multiword units through English, which is co-financed by the EU, aims at a well-founded, corpus-based selection of learning material to be didactically prepared. In the following article, the linguistic selection criteria of the German idioms for the digital German-English learning resource and the results of its analyses are presented: the results of a frequency study in the current corpora of German and - since the project is committed to the plurilingual approach - the list of German idioms whose English-language equivalents show high formal-semantic convergence. Title: On the selection of idioms for didactic purposes using the example of the project PhraseoLab