An investigation of lexical progress of teaching foreign languages (TFL) learners in terms of part-of-speech

Abstract

In the related literature, it has been discussed that issues related to foreign language lexicon have been ignored; therefore, a solid theory of foreign language lexicon has not been constructed yet. In the framework of Turkish as a foreign language, the literature lacks both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. To this end, this longitudinal study tries to find out the lexical progress of learners of Turkish as a foreign language. 20 teaching foreign languages (TFL) learners from a variety of nationalities participated in the study which lasted about a year. The participants started at A1 level of language proficiency and were certificated with C1 proficiency level. The learners were asked to write compositions at two-month intervals. The topics for the compositions were chosen from the Common European Framework of Reference. The compositions were analyzed and the word contents were categorized based on their part-of-speech as verbs, nouns, interjections, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions and pronouns. Each category was converted into ratios taking into account the total tokens in each composition. As the measures were taken from the same group at different intervals, Friedman’s test was used. The results revealed that, among the part-of-speech categories, the ratio of nouns to the total tokens in the compositions decreased significantly while the ratio of verbs increased. In addition, there were statistically significant differences in the ratios of all the other part-of-speech categories. Key words: Turkish as a foreign language, foreign language writing, part-of-speech, interlanguage.