Discovery Learning and Teaching with Electronic Corpora in an Advanced German Grammar Course

This study describes the design and implementation of a usage-based and corpus-based advanced Germangrammar course. Teaching materials for the course includedDWDS, or Digitales Wrterbuch der deutschen Sprache: a large, representative, free and publicly available corpus of contemporary German texts. The article outlines specific theoretically informed principles for course design and presents a logical progression of corpus- basedgrammar-teaching activities as used in this course. It also reports participants' post-course reactions which were very positive. The article contains practical recommendations for educators interested in trying out corpus- based activities for teaching German grammar at different proficiency levels as well as to different participant groups. Furthermore, it promotes a more holistic perspective toward grammar as a meaning-making resource compatible with innovative approaches to grammar pedagogy.