Mother tongue usage of 14-18 age group youth

Language, which is an indispensable part of our lives, is the most important and fundamental tool enabling communication among people. To be able to set a healthy communication, language education and teaching is of great importance. In this thesis, it is aimed to detect how the language education and teaching has its place in daily lives of young people aged between 14 and 18. Youngsters' problems in using their mother tongue, which is in the scope of new Turkish language, have been discussed in many fields and various articles on the topic have been written by academicians. In this study, a total of hundred students, including twenty-five students from four different types of schools, including anatolian high school, vocational high school, imam hatip high school and general high school, were asked to write a thought or an essay in the form of trial, criticism or memorial under the supervision of a teacher. The texts written by the students were first identified and the number and frequency of usage of the preferred words were listed. Then, the texts of the students who were educated in different kinds of schools were evaluated in terms of the influence of the school type they attend to, and the relationship between the social environment and the word choice of the students were investigated. When the findings were evaluated, it was observed that the social environment to which the students belong has a bigger impact on students' vocabulary rather than the type of school. Key words: Word presence, vocabulary, word frequency