A corpus-based analysis of textbooks used in the orientation course for immigrants in Germany: Ideological and pedagogic implications

Contextualized within immigrants’ acquisition of specialized knowledge about the host country at the institutional level, this article examines a 64295-word corpus of textbooks written for participants of the orientation course in German politics, history and culture. Corpus-based techniques (“keyness,” collocation and qualitative examination of concordance lines) are deployed to explore the corpus. The findings reveal that the collocational patterns of the identified keywords construct particular world views vis-à-vis Germany. For instance, the keyword DDR [German Democratic Republic (GDR), aka East Germany] frequently co-occurs with negatively connoted lexis while collocates of the keywords denoting present-day Germany (e.g., Bundesrepublik Deutschland [Federal Republic of Germany] and Staat [nation, country, state]) facilitate the portrayal of Germany as a nurturing welfare state that is popular among foreigners. It is argued that such discursively-construed opposition between the “bad” GDR and the “good” Federal Republic of Germany helps to legitimize the German reunification. Furthermore, it is found that certain keywords (e.g., Sie [you], Kurs [course, class] and z.B. [e.g.]) are “metadiscourse resources” (Hyland, 2005). Their pedagogic effects are discussed in relation to the ideological implications of the research findings.