Abstract:

Although Turkish is being taught in compliance with Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), the words used while teaching Turkish and the ones in the textbooks are not based on any frequency lists. Thus, the present study aims to reveal to what extent the most frequent words used in textbooks for teaching Turkish and English coincide with the most frequent words of the basic core vocabulary. To this end, the words used in Istanbul A1 and A2 level Turkish textbooks were compared with the words from “Yazılı Türkçenin Kelime Sıklığı Sözlüğü” (Word Frequency Dictionary of Written Turkish) (Göz, 2013). Similarly, the words used in American Headway Starter and 1 (level) English textbooks were compared with the words in New General Service List (Culligan et al, 2014) in terms of similarity. It was concluded that there was a need for a list of words that are frequently used in teaching Turkish as a foreign language to be used in teaching Turkish as a foreign language.

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