Determination of Turkish academic vocabulary for international students

When the literature on Turkish vocabulary is examined, it can be put forth that vocabulary studies are handled in a variety of ways. Some of these studies can be classified as: Studies focusing on the origins of words and revealing the changes they have undergone over time, studies centering upon the structure of the words and examining the affixes they take along with the use of these affixes, or studies focusing on the meanings of the words based on the contexts they are used in. When these studies are scrunutized in the light of the literature, it can be stated that there are very few vocabulary studies for academic Turkish. Based on this, the present study aims to identify the examples of real life academic language use through corpus linguistics and incorporate them in learning/teaching environment through a vocabulary list. For this purpose, a representative, large-scale specialized corpus has been tried to collect. Based on the corpus, named the Academic Corpus of Turkish (ACT), the Academic Vocabulary List of Turkish (AVLT) including 1567 words was prepared taking into account the ratio, range, distribution and discipline criteria. With the help of the academic corpus and academic vocabulary list created, an essential material that B2 and higher level international students can benefit especially in academic Turkish lessons both inside and outside the classroom has been developed. This educational material is made available not only to the students but also to instructors, material designers, exam developers and researchers interested in vocabulary studies. Thus, it is thought that a step has been taken towards determining definable, realistic targets for academic Turkish lessons and contributing to a more qualified academic Turkish education for international students.