Academic vocabulary in the field of engineering in teaching Turkish as a foreign language

The academic language teaching problem of international students who are studying in Türkiye has negative effects on their academic success. Teaching academic Turkish as a foreign language for special purposes has gained importance in order to ensure that students understand course contents better, read and evaluate scientific texts effectively and use terms in their own fields. It is thought that corpus studies have a very important place in vocabulary teaching. However, it is thought that there are not enough studies on the relevant field. In this context, it was deemed necessary to conduct a study on engineering technical and academic vocabulary in order to use it in academic Turkish courses as a foreign language for special purposes. The engineering corpus that was tried to be created within the scope of the study is divided into 7 sub-fields: computer, environment, food, construction, mining, mechanical and textile engineering. The database that was created in each sub-field consists of 475000 (+/- 5%) lexemes. A total of 1079 articles randomly selected from journals scanned in ULAKBİM in the field of engineering were compiled and classified according to relevant subfields. In the study, a database of 3,353,745 lexemes was created. Among the lexemes in the obtained technical vocabulary, terms with a usage frequency of 10 or more, words, verbs, prepositions and conjunctions for scientific Turkish were identified, word lists were prepared and the usage of the specified lexemes in the sub-engineering corpora were compared with each other. The most important point that draws attention as a result of the study is that the terms and words related to scientific Turkish in the sub-corpora are used more than other lexemes. Additionally, the digital and usage rates of related lexemes are similar in all sub-corpora. The common terms and units in the sub-corpora have been developed, and environmental science, which has the most common terms and academic words, has been reached because the field with the most common verbs is civil engineering. It is hoped that the study will contribute to teaching and material design to international students who will study in the field of engineering, instructors and researchers in the field during special-purpose academic Turkish courses.