Johns (1997) argues that corpus-informed metatalk with a foreign language expert helps trainee writers to book progress in autonomous text revision. This so-called kibbitzing method was mixed into a German course -based on the TV soap Weissensee-, offered to a group of French students, which covered online discussions centered on verb particles regarded as pertinent for execution of the writing task, namely to contrive a film script scene for the Weissensee series. The students acquired more insight into the semantic intricacy of verb particles, and a better grasp of the relation between content and form.