Vocabulary of Turkish Children’s Literature: High Frequency Words

Abstract

Children’s literature is undoubtedly one of the most important elements that support children’s cognitive, linguistic and personal development. Content analyses of children’s books with respect to the principle of child-appropriateness are common, and studies of the vocabulary in selected works by Turkish children’s authors have also become common. However, apart from a few notable investigations, an insufficient number of works have been analysed to represent the overall vocabulary of Turkish children’s literature. This situation highlights the importance of expanding corpus-based vocabulary research in children’s literature, since approaches that increase representativeness through the number of works and genre diversity can yield sound results. The aim of this study is to present the comprehensive vocabulary of Turkish children’s literature in the form of high-frequency word list in a corpusbased manner. Corpus-based research is a type of descriptive study that employs quantitative and statistical data collection tools. The sample of the study consists of 1,058 Turkish children’s literature works published between 1970 and 2012. Accordingly, the lexical structures of these 1,058 works were tagged and listed in the Turkish Children’s Literature Corpus, the first specialised corpus for the field, which totals 8,639,522 words (+/−). The findings are first presented with per-million occurrence rates and part-of-speech information. It is considered that the study’s methodology and results will contribute to areas such as vocabulary research in children’s literature, early reading and writing instruction, mother-tongue education, and the teaching of Turkish as a foreign language.