The aim of the present paper is to provide an overview (updated to April 2017) of the
corpora of spoken German, which are relevant to the teaching of German as a foreign
language and freely available on the Internet. These include, on the one hand, the
L1 corpora, which are useful for designing syllabuses, developing authentic teaching
materials and for direct application in the classroom, and on the other, L2 corpora for the
study of second language acquisition. The following aspects are presented and discussed:
scope and representativeness of the corpus; types of discourse, speakers and varieties;
transcription, annotation and metadata; available query tools and download options;
possible uses in the classroom; and publications. With respect to the L1 corpora, FOLK and
the corpus "Gesprochene Sprache für die Auslandsgermanistik" provide a sufficient basis
for research and teaching. However, it would be desirable to supplement the conversationanalytic
approach with phonetically and prosodically annotated corpora. With regard
to the web-based L2 corpora (GeWiss and BeMaTaC) the range of communication types
(examination interview, student and expert presentation, map task dialogue) and L1
languages (English, Polish, partly Bulgarian and Italian) is quite limited. Here, it would
be desirable to set up further corpora to comprehensively investigate the acquisition of
German as a foreign or second language.
