Aim & Scope

Within the scope of my dissertation named "Determination of Academic Vocabulary List of Turkish", it is aimed to determine the academic vocabulary of Turkish and to develop a general academic vocabulary list from which international students can benefit, especially starting from B2 level. For this purpose, a representative, large-scale specialized corpus has been collected in a way that the examples of real life language use for academic Turkish can be described through.

Considering both the genres representing academic Turkish and the disciplines preferred by the international students, the corpus, named the Academic Corpus of Turkish (ACT), gathered not only the articles from science and engineering, health sciences, social sciences and humanities but also the basic textbooks taught in the mentioned branches. The corpus includes a total of 18,013,569 tokens from 45 subject areas, 4542 articles and 61 textbooks. This corpus, which includes the examples of academic texts of Turkish used in today, developed with a synchronic perspective, covering a period of 10 years (2011-2021) has the characteristics of being the largest-scale, balanced, specialized academic corpus of Turkish.

Based on this corpus, taking into account the ratio, range, distribution and discipline criteria in order to distinguish general academic words from both the high-frequency words in the general corpus and technical words, the Academic Vocabulary List of Turkish (AVLT) including 1567 words was prepared.

As a result of the study, with the help of the academic corpus and academic vocabulary list created, a material that B2 and higher level international students can benefit especially in academic Turkish lessons both inside and outside the classroom has been developed. This educational material is made available not only to the students but also to instructors, material designers, exam developers and researchers interested in vocabulary studies. Thus, it is thought that a step has been taken towards determining definable, realistic targets for academic Turkish lessons and contributing to a more qualified academic Turkish education for international students.