A Corpus-Based Study of Academic German Writing Conventions and Their Transfer to Nigerian Learner Texts

This study conducts a corpus-based investigation of the transfer of German academic writing conventions to the written academic texts produced by advanced Nigerian learners, examining the degree to which discipline-specific rhetorical structures, citation practices, hedging strategies, and cohesive devices characteristic of authentic German academic discourse are present or absent in Nigerian German learner academic writing. German academic writing operates according to a distinct set of rhetorical conventions, including complex nominal structures, authorial stance through hedging, and argument organisation patterns that differ significantly from those of English academic discourse. The study constructs a two-part corpus comprising a reference corpus of published German academic texts in linguistics and literature (500,000 words) and a learner corpus of Masters and PhD-level German academic writing from Nigerian universities (200,000 words). Corpus annotation and contrastive analysis are applied to identify systematic divergences between learner and reference corpus writing along eight rhetorical and linguistic dimensions. Findings reveal that Nigerian learner academic German writing exhibits characteristic deviations in hedging density, nominal group complexity, argument structure signalling, and paraphrase versus direct citation ratios. The study develops a corpus-informed academic writing curriculum for advanced Nigerian German learners. Keywords: corpus linguistics, academic German writing, Nigerian learners, rhetorical transfer, academic discourse.