Lexical consepts and conceptual fields in B1- level Turkish coursebook

The words and concepts that the learners are exposed to in the textbooks prepared for learners of Turkish as a foreign language are important in their learning Turkish and developing their vocabulary. The aim of this study is to determine the concepts and conceptual field in the texts in the books (B1 level) used in teaching Turkish as a foreign language. Within the scope of the study, the concepts, conceptual fields and word frequency in the textbooks titled Altay Türkçe Öğreniyorum ve Türkçeye Yolculuk, prepared at B1 level for foreigners were examined. The data of the study were obtained by document analysis method and analyzed by content analysis and category analysis. After the texts in the textbooks were digitized, the concepts in the texts were classified as high-level, basic and low-level using MAXQDA 2018.2. By comparing the concepts, common concepts in the textbooks were determined. In order to determine the word frequency, the words in the texts were analyzed with the MS Excel program using descriptive statistics and a final frequency list was created. As a result of the classification of the concepts, 28 concept field, 146 category and 1805 concept in Altay Türkçe Öğreniyorum B1 textbook; 28 concept field, 137 category and 1676 concept have been identified in Türkçeye Yolculuk B1 textbook. The number of low-level concepts in both textbooks is 409. According to the word frequency analysis, 69.53% of 2596 words in Altay Türkçe Öğreniyorum B1 textbook; and 65.88% of 2544 words in Türkçeye Yolculuk B1 textbook, were found to be concepts. As a result, it is clearly seen that the word counts and concept ratios are close to each other. Key Words: concept, concept fields, proto- type theory, vocabulary, word frequency.