Determining the number of words that students learning Turkish as a foreign language should know in daily life

It is impossible to consider the concepts of language and words separately from each other. Words are the most basic communication tool that individuals use to understand others and express themselves. Words are always needed in order to sustain daily life. Words form the basis of language learning. As the teaching process progresses, grammar and understanding-comprehension steps are followed step by step. This effort is to lay a solid foundation for language teaching. In order to realize a functional vocabulary teaching in the teaching of Turkish as a foreign language, this subject should be emphasized carefully and meticulously. Before determining the words and phrases to be used in teaching Turkish to foreign students, necessary research should be carried out by taking the students' needs and readiness into consideration. In the literature, there are studies on word teaching, vocabulary, word frequency. however, although similar studies have been conducted, for a foreign person to maintain his living in Turkey and which words he / she will need in his daily life in different environments, there has not been enough research yet. The aim of this study is to determine target words for students who are learning Turkish as a foreign language, to compile the number of basic words and the basic words used in daily life and to determine how many words out of frequency dictionaries a person learning Turkish as a foreign language needs to know to understand the compiled words. The research was conducted in Antalya and Burdur provinces. The sample of the research, distributed to main categories such as shopping, nutrition / accommodation, travel / entertainment, public and private institutions, health / personal care and transportation in designated provincial centers, consists of the related people like doctor, banker, tailor, greengrocer, cashier, driver, etc. in daily life. Applied research method was used in the study. Firstly, field work was carried out by the researcher. In order to maintain daily life, the areas needed by individuals were determined, and data were collected by taking audio recordings from the designated areas. Collected data were transferred to computer environment. The transcriptions of the sound recordings were recorded as Microsoft Word files on the computer. After making the necessary arrangements in the relevant files, a sound pool was created. The frequencies of the words in the sound pool were determined with the help of the "Simple Concordance 4.0.9" program. Creating a list of the words, whose frequencies were determined, in Göz (2003) and Aksan et al. (2017) frequency dictionaries, their places has been checked in those dictionaries. The results were found for each environment separately. Based on the findings obtained, the total number of different words compiled from daily life was determined as 2137. Looking at the distribution by categories, the total number of different words compiled from shopping environments is 869, the total number of different words compiled from nutrition and shelter environment, total number of different words compiled from travel and entertainment environments is 966, total number of different words compiled from public and private institutions 348, total number of different words collected from health and personal care settings 899 and the total number of different words compiled from transportation media is 463. After the findings obtained are compared with related researches, for those who learn Turkish as a foreign language to know the compiled words, it was concluded that they should know the first 16.000+ words of Göz (2003) and 4000-5000+ words in Aksan et al (2017 out of the frequency dictionaries. At the end of the study, various suggestions were made based on the findings obtained.