Lexical approach in teaching turkish as a foreign language: The implementation of the verb "al-"

This study, conducted within the lexical approach paradigm, examines the influence of context and corpus-based instructional practices on enhancing the lexical proficiency of B1-B2 level students. The research is specifically tailored to the instruction of the polysemous verb "al-" (take/get). The quantitative aspect of the study was designed using a quasi-experimental design with a pretest-posttest matched control group. The experimental group consisted of 21 students at the B1-B2 level, while the control group comprised 20 students. Qualitative data were obtained through interview and document analysis techniques; these qualitative findings were utilized to expound upon the quantitative results. During the process, instructional practices prepared in accordance with the lexical approach, based on context and corpus, were implemented with the experimental group for 6 weeks following the pre-test. Throughout this period, no educational intervention was administered to the control group. Following the implementation, a post-test was administered to both the experimental and control groups, and a retention test was conducted for the experimental group nine weeks after the post-test. In the analysis of data obtained from the pre-test, post-test, and retention test, appropriate statistical methods were employed by examining the normal distribution of the data. Interview data were analyzed through inductive qualitative analysis, while documents (activity booklets) were analyzed through error analysis. The findings have indicated that context and corpus-based practices prepared within the lexical approach for the instruction of the polysemous verb "al-" have been effective in enhancing student achievement. The results of the achievement test revealed that in the literal, connotational, figurative, and idiomatic meaning sub-dimensions, the experimental group's mean scores on the post-test were higher than those of the control group, and this difference was determined to be statistically significant. According to the findings derived from the error analysis, it has been shown that students exhibited a decreasing trend in errors made in linguistic units where the verb "al-" occurred throughout the process. The findings obtained from the interviews also support the positive outcomes of the application. As a result, it has been observed that context and corpus-based instructional practices prepared within the lexical approach are effective in enhancing vocabulary proficiency. KEYWORDS: Lexical Approach, Context, Collocation, Corpus, Polysemy