Corpus-based study of vocabulary in health sciences for teaching Turkish as a foreign language

Although studies on the vocabulary of Turkish have been carried out so far, keyword lists that distinguish the domain-specific language from the general language cannot be found. In addition, no independent study on the vocabulary of health sciences can be identified in the literature. Nowadays, as the role and importance of specicific-purpose language teaching is generally accepted, it would not be wrong to say that it would be more appropriate to determine the words to be used in such teaching activities with corpus-based and scientific methods rather than instinctively determining them. In this context, Health Sciences Corpus (SBD), reaching a collection of more than 7 million tokens, was created in this study, derived from 90 full-issue files from the issues of the 5 most downloaded journals published on the DergiPark website in the field of health sciences, published between 2018-2023, and 5 textbooks published in the field of health sciences, which were determined by purposeful sampling method. The list of 1213 words obtained after the corpus was examined according to frequency, prevalence and keyword score values and the determined cut-off values were applied, and the product was named Health Sciences Keyword List (SBSL). As previously found out in the literature, SBSL constitutes approximately 22% of SBD and consists mostly of nouns and adjectives. It was also found that that there were 142 words in the list that could be considered as general academic words, and since these words were used more frequently in health sciences than general Turkish, it was decided to keep them in the list. It is thought that SBSL can be considered as a resource to be used when creating specific-purpose language teaching programs for the benefit of international students who will study in health sciences or when creating teaching materials for such a program.