Johns reports in his text "Kibbitzing one-to-ones" (1997) that corpus-informed metatalk with a foreign language expert helps apprentice writers to make progress in independent text revision. Expecting this progress to be based on the development of expert-like ways to observe language features, I integrated Johns' so-called kibbitzing methodology into a German course based on the TV love story "Weissensee." The course, offered to a group of French students, included online discussions focused on verb particles considered to be relevant for execution of the writing task, which was to invent a film script scene for the "Weissensee" series. The students used the specialised "Weissensee" corpus and the general corpus "deTenTen" as writing aids. Both were accessed through the "Sketch Engine" concordancer. This article outlines the way in which the students talked with their teacher about language samples retrieved in concordance lines or in the first drafts of their writing tasks. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data--the scripts of the discussions and the transcript of the filmed interview--provides the following results: the students got more insight into the semantic complexity of verb particles, and they got a better understanding of the link between content and form.