Journal of Mother Tongue Education

Abstract

Frequency studies on a language reveal
important information for the education of that language. Common frequency
studies are aimed at identifying the most commonly used words in a language.
The mainspring of these studies is that in almost every language, some words
are used more frequently than others. Determining the frequently used words in
the language and giving priority to teaching these words in the planning of the
educational process facilitates the functional teaching of the language. The
majority of the studies on frequency in Turkish are aimed at determining the
frequency of words and limited idioms and proverbs. There is no comprehensive
study on phoneme-letter frequency. In this study, the phonetic frequency of
Turkish was determined from two basic perspectives. Firstly, the headings in
the Turkish Dictionary were analyzed in terms of phoneme-letter frequency.
Secondly, the phoneme-letter frequency in general written use of the language
was determined by taking a sample from a pool created for corpus studies. The
obtained data related to the phoneme-letter frequency were evaluated by
comparing. In the discussion and conclusion part of the study, the data
obtained from the phoneme-letter frequency were evaluated and the clusters used
in the first literacy teaching were evaluated, and the extent to which the
first literacy phoneme sets overlap with the Turkish phonetic features was
discussed. Finally, it was evaluated how the data related to the phoneme-letter
frequency can be used in teaching Turkish to foreigners.