Academic Turkish education as a foreign language: The academic and technical vocabulary in social sciences

Within the scope of the study, it was aimed to determine the technical and academic vocabulary of Turkish language in the field of social sciences and to prepare an academic word list for educational purpose to be used in academic Turkish courses as a foreign language. Towards this end, the social sciences are divided into 18 areas, namely archeology, philosophy, communication, political sciences, sports sciences, theology, history, psychology, geography, art, sociology, anthropology, urban planning, tourism, education, finance, linguistics and literature. A database of 1,854,157 lexemes was created through compiling a minimum of 100,000 lexeme (max 5% +) from 385 articles from 58 magazines published between 2005 and 2016 in these 18 areas. Each sub-field in the social sciences in this database is regarded as a technical vocabulary and by clearing the words with a frequency of 10 and higher from the repetition, words with concept values were categorized as verbs, prepositions and conjunctions. Besides, the words which have concept values were evaluated within themselves in terms of terminological words, words for scientific Turkish and words which are common to other sub-corpora. As a result of the study, an educational academic vocabulary consisting of the words which are common to the 18 sub-areas of social sciences, words with a frequency greater than 100 and words for general scientific Turkish as well as prepositions, conjunctions and verbs was created and made available for the use of learners of Academic Turkish as a foreign language, trainers, material designers and researchers.