Anadili Türkçe olan İngiliz Dili Eğitimi öğrencileri ve anadili İngilizce olan öğrencilerin tartışmacı yazılarında akademik sözcük kullanımı: Derlem temelli bir çalışma

Academic vocabulary refers to the words traditionally employed in both written and spoken academic discourse and have been recognized from an academic texts corpus. Some academic vocabulary lists summarize the frequency of each term or word family used in academic texts (Coxhead, 2000). Researchers suggest that one word out of ten or one out of seven in a line of academic writing may be an academic word (Coxhead, 2000; Gardner & Davies, 2014). Studying academically at English-medium institutions requires a larger amount of reading and writing and comprehension of academic discourse; students need to know a significant number of academic vocabulary. Considering the importance of academic vocabulary, the current study aims to investigate academic vocabulary usage in argumentative essays written by English Language Teaching (ELT) Department students in Turkiye. For the study, a specialized learner corpus was compiled a corpus named Turkish Learner Corpus (TLC), with 140 first-year students studying at the English Language Department of Amasya University, Gaziantep University, and Trabzon University. The TLC includes argumentative essays written in the Writing Skills Course during the 2021-2022 Spring Semester. As a reference corpus, the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS), the corpus of native speakers of native university students, was investigated. For this corpus-based study, in the first part, AntConc 3.5.8, a corpus software, was used to see the general lexical profile of the writers in the TLC and the LOCNESS by preparing a frequency-based academic vocabulary list. In the second part of the study, it was examined whether there was a statistical difference in lexical diversity in TLC compared to LOCNESS. In addition, the over and/or underuse of academic vocabulary used in TLC compared to the LOCNESS corpus was examined. The study's results revealed that when we analyzed the top words in Academic Vocabulary List (Gardner & Davies, 2014), the most frequently used and least used academic words were the same in native and non-native corpora. The words used in Turkish ELT learners' writing were more varied than in native English learners. Furthermore, the investigation of academic vocabulary showed the overuse of some academic vocabulary (e.g. result, experience, provide) by Turkish ELT students while others (e.g. role, effect, group) were underused compared to native speakers of English.