Determining of the word classes in teaching turkish to foreign children

Nowadays, raising individuals who can use one or more foreign languages close to their native language has become one of the fundamentals of education. The child, who starts to learn his mother tongue at an early age, first learns the concepts that are of primary importance in his life while creating his vocabulary. These concepts are essential for meeting the needs of the child and maintaining social relations. Therefore, the teaching of words and word classes, which are the basic keys of communication and meet the concepts in the language, has a great importance in foreign language teaching. In this study, it is aimed to determine the word classes used by children between the ages of 4-6 who are native speakers of Turkish in their natural speech in the classroom and to list these word classes by considering age and gender variables. It is to determine the types of words that these lists can use in preparing activities while teaching Turkish to foreign children of the same age group. This study is structured qualitatively. Data were obtained by observation. Since the use of natural language in the context of the classroom will be examined only in the context of the classroom, non-participant observation type of the observation method was used. Participants of the study are children between 4-6 years old whose mother tongue is Turkish in İzmir-Karşıyaka Suzan Divrik Vocational and Technical Anatolian High School Practical Kindergarten. Natural conversations of 10 children from the age group of 4, 16 from the age group of 16, and 19 children from the age group of 6 in total, and a total of 45 children in the classroom, were collected by audio recording and observation forms we prepared. The sound recordings consisted of 120 minutes separately for the 4-5-6 age group and 360 minutes in total. After 360 minutes were completed, these recordings were translated into transliteration. Through observation forms and transliteration, all the data were put into a list by considering the types of words used by children, gender and age variables. As a result of the obtained data, it was determined that the most common word used by children in the 4-6 age group was noun. The most used word classes after the noun was determined as verb, adverb, adjective, pronoun, conjunction, interjection and postposition. Keywords: Language acquisition, early childhood period, Turkish as a foreing language, word classes.