The preparation of the contrastive list of Turkish-English false cognates and its use in teaching Turkish as a foreign language

The study aims at drawing up a list of false cognates and partial false cognates between Turkish and English. The study also looks into the ways of using this listing in teaching Turkish as a foreign language.Teaching vocabulary plays an important part in language teaching, which is evidenced by the high number of studies conducted in the field of vocabulary teaching. Experts are trying out new techniques in order to make the process of learning new words easier for the learners. As is the case with other areas of foreign language teaching and acquisition, learners are inevitably affected by their native tongues. The effect can both be positive ? thus supporting the learning process, and negative especially as a result of over generalisations which lead to errors.The two lists drawn up by using descriptive methodology and methods of document analysis, resemble those prepared for many other languages. It has been noted that Turkish-English lists do not exist for learners of Turkish as a foreign language. These lists cannot only be used as teaching materials by language instructors, but they can also be used by course book writers and error analysts when the findings are backed by survey results.The two major sources of reference which the study is based upon are Turkish Dictionary, published by the Turkish Language Institution in 2007, and the online dictionary of the same institution on its official webpage (http://tdkterim.gov.tr/bts/). All the words in these dictionaries are simultaneously searched, and the lexical items which were believed to be cognates were then compared with the meanings in English, provided by the Merriam-Webster (http://www.merriam-webster.com/), Oxford Dictionaries (http://oxforddictionaries.com/) and Cambridge Dictionaries Online (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/). The differences in meaning were looked at, and the list has finally been prepared. The materials which can be prepared using these lists are not within the scope of this study. In a following study, it could be highly beneficial to make a list of cognates.