Comparison of "Deutsch Macht Spaß" and "Menschen" books in terms of vocabulary

As a result of the friendship and interaction throughout the decades between Turkey and Germany, German language has become increasingly important in Turkey and the number of people who speak German today has increased in this direction. German courses have been started to be taught in both universities and high schools and the need for qualified people who speak German has started to be addressed. When it comes to foreign language courses, it can be said that one of the most important sources of information is textbooks. In this study, deutsch macht Spaß A1.2 Schülerbuch (DMS) prepared by the Ministry of National Education for use in high schools and Menschen A1.2 Kursbuch (Menschen), the book used by the Goethe Institute in German courses, were compared in terms of reading texts and the vocabulary available in these texts. The aim of this study is to make an assessment to determine the status of the books in terms of vocabulary and to state if there is a point to be changed or corrected and bring the results to the attention of the Ministry of National Education and the Goethe-Institute. Thus, to help prepare a better textbook in terms of vocabulary. This study is limited to the DMS prepared by the Ministry of National Education Publications in 2018 and Menschen prepared in 2012 by the Hueber Verlag publishing house that is used by the Goethe-Institute. The reading texts contained in these books are discussed in the experimental section. The words in the reading texts contained in both books were examined in terms of diversity and repetition rate. First of all, the reading texts in both books and the exercises related to these texts were determined and then the words present in these texts were counted. During the counting of words, the words were filtered and automatically counted with the assistance of a program. The aforementioned filter is described in detail in the experimental section. Analysis was carried out with the help of graphs and statistics based on word counts. The generated results were expressed in percentage and ultimately a conclusion was reached by comparing the percentages of the both books. As a result of the study, the reading texts in the DMS book were not evenly distributed to the sections and the reading ability could not be supported in an orderly and healthy manner. For example, the fifth section does not include any reading texts, while the eighth section contains eight reading texts. This situation has to be corrected with placing an average number of reading texts in each section. This is not the case in the Menschen book, on average six reading texts were tried to be included in each section. As a result, it was observed that there are reading texts that are in need to be edited in both books, but there are more reading texts in the DMS book that are in need of correction compared to the Menschen book. When the books were compared in terms of vocabulary, menschen was found to have a richer vocabulary than the DMS book. In addition, Menschen book had 23 reading texts, while the DMS book had 38 reading texts. Although Menschen book contains fewer reading texts it has a higher word count, the use of more words forces students to engage with a wider and deeper vocabulary in certain areas. This situation is very important for the development of vocabulary. In the DMS book, fewer words were used while more reading texts were included. In this case, it can be argued that the book DMS forces students to be more superficially interested in vocabulary in many different subjects. It is clear that having a superficial vocabulary in various subjects is not healthy, as it will require learning multiple word families and will make the word associations difficult. In addition, it was determined that the most commonly used word of the DMS book in one section was the verb sein with 37 repetitions, and in the Menschen book, this data was also the verb sein with 18 repetitions. The fact that the most frequently repeated word in a section is repeated 18 times is proof that a wider range of words is present in this section. This also shows the superiority of menschen's book in terms of vocabulary. On the other hand, when the vocabulary of all reading texts in the books were compared as a whole, it was observed that 50% of the words in the DMS book and 57% of the words in the Menschen book were used once. This statistic means that students will see approximately one in two words they read in the book for the first time. Menschen also featured in this field with a 7% margin, again showing her quality in vocabulary. Based on this data, Menschen has been proven to be a more effective and reliable source of students' vocabulary than the DMS book.