Using Text Corpora in Teaching of German Language

When learning a foreign language, the learner will always deal with different challenges and it is very difficult for him to make significant progress without being directly assisted by experts of that language. This article will try, keeping in mind the abovementioned point, to introduce the concept of “text corpora” and the ways they can be used in teaching a specific language to have the learner overcome such challenges. “Text corpus” refers to a set of digitalized oral and written texts that helps and assists linguistic researchers in their research. Of course, the author of this article does not intend to discuss the changes and developments of language, rather he intends to demonstrate that learners can employ and utilize text corpora to overcome many of the challenges of learning a new language even when isolation of the experts of the language. In order to do so, we will discuss the process through which a text corpus is developed and how to search within it using Corpus Query Language (CQL).