Developing a Textbook-Based Academic Turkish Wordlist

Abstract

Vocabulary knowledge is solid bedrock, upon which other language skills can be built. Wilkins (1972) asserted that "without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed". Since the pioneering research of Michael West (1953), many academic or general wordlists have been published in English or in other languages. On the other hand, the lack of an Academic Turkish Wordlist which meets the academic criteria such as being collected from a valid corpus has made this research necessary in the field of teaching Turkish as a foreign language. This study aims to investigate the academic vocabulary that any Turkish language learner should have before starting to study at undergraduate programs offering Turkish medium instruction. An academic corpus derived from fifty-seven textbooks was formed so as to discover the Academic Turkish Wordlist. There were 4032442 tokens in the academic corpus and various computer software programs some of which were written for the current study were used in order to acquire the academic wordlist. Lemmas, or the groups of lexical forms with the same stem that belong to the same word class, (Francis & Kucera, 1982) were used for the creation of the Academic Turkish Wordlist. Moreover, the most frequent 11000 words from Turkish National Corpus were used to make a list of words to be excluded from the academic corpus and the final version of the Academic Turkish Wordlist contained 1010 lemmas. The Academic Turkish Wordlist covered 32% of the academic corpus and it is evident that knowing the words in the academic wordlist will help undergraduate foreign students studying Turkish improve their academic language skills, especially reading comprehension. The Academic Turkish Wordlist could be utilized in various ways: 1) to check out language learning materials in order to find out how many low/high frequency words they contain 2) to compare students' writings in terms of how many academic words they are able to use 3) to prepare proficiency exams 4) to revise their language program in order to include more academic words to prepare their students for undergraduate programs. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd.