This action-research in applied linguistics investigates the evolution of adolescent learners of German as a foreign language during a project involving corpus exploration. It focuses on the role played by resources, tools, face-to-face learning versus distance learning and by the pedagogical relationship. My research analyzes how the learners perceived and exploited three small specialized corpora containing texts representing each one sub-genre of the « tourist information » genre. The learners explored them by means of concordance lines. Firstly, I observe what the learners said about the input and what they did with it. Secondly, I describe how the language and the discourse used in the texts changed during the project. The tasks and tools of the project helped some of the learners to develop reading habits which focus on information retrieval more than on complete comprehension of the text. The effects are texts written in a German ha! ving linguistic features that resemble those attested in the explored corpora. The intertextual writing method offered by the project supports acculturation to the foreign language. By means of concordancing and the import of collocations, the learners are now able to deal with some language features, especially with the domain of German adjective inflection, better than before.
