A vocabulary study on eminently read novels of Turkish from 1980 to 2010

In our study on vocabulary analysis of Turkish novels published between 1980 and 2010, primarily the answer for the need in the areas of reading skills and vocabulary teaching while teaching Turkish as a foreign language Turkish novels were choosen. After that, studies that investigate learner?s needs by using a corpus were reviewed and a corpus, consisting 30 best-selling, award winning novels, was built. First a quantitive research was conducted and the numbers of types and tokens were defined. Also type/token ratio and its usage while reading in a foreign language was discussed. Moreover a frequency study was carried out on the corpus and the most frequent words, lemmas and word stems of Turkish were arrayed. Also the novels were separated in groups of printing dates; four distinctive groups of three decades and the corpus as a whole were analysed in terms of common lexicon. Finally upon the arrangement of the words that are to be taught in a Turkish as a foreign language classroom, the use of these frequency lists and which words to master prior to reading Turkish novels for foreigners were discussed in the last part. Key words : Turkish novel, corpus, word frequency, word count, type/token ratio, common lexicon